After finishing eighth in Sao Paulo, Lewis Hamilton acknowledged that he was looking forward to being done with driving the W14 when the 2023 season came to an end. George Russell, who retired from the race, referred to it as the “slowest weekend of our year”.
Hamilton started the race in fifth position but quickly moved up to third place thanks to his strong start. However, he lost a spot to Fernando Alonso at the restart, which came after the red flags were raised by the crashes involving Alex Albon and Kevin Magnussen.
The British driver lost ground to Lance Stroll, Carlos Sainz, and Pierre Gasly before finishing in eighth place. Sergio Perez passed him a few laps later as the Briton kept falling down the field.
When asked about his race-day struggles, Hamilton responded, “Well, it didn’t feel as disastrous as [the Sprint] yesterday.” My tires were so worn out that when I finished yesterday, I had nothing left on them.
“I think I drove a better race today in terms of making the best use of my tyre management, but the car just seems to have moments when it works and moments when it doesn’t.
We need to figure out why it is so inconsistent throughout the lap. In addition, we are very slow in the corners and on the straightaways, or at least we have trouble getting the car through them. One to forget, but ideally there are many lessons to be learned today.
When questioned if set-up issues were to blame for Mercedes’ lack of pace over the weekend, Hamilton replied: “I think it’s difficult to say. One thing is the car is really unpredictable in the sense of one weekend it feels good, one session it feels good and then not.“I’m sure we will go and look at things and find out if we should have done things differently, but with the one practice session it’s difficult. But I’m still proud of the team.
“They still came here and did their work, they hold their head up high and that’s what we have to be able to continue to do, just keep pushing forwards. Two more races with this thing and then hopefully no more driving it!”
Russell, on the other hand, had been running behind Hamilton and was well within DRS range of his team mate in the early stages of the race. But he began to fall further off the pace as the race went on before the call came in for him to retire his car.
“We had a cooling problem that we couldn’t get under control for the last 20 laps,” explained Russell. “It had no influence on our lack of performance. Really strange weekend, probably by far the slowest weekend of our year. So, we need to understand why because we had high expectations coming into this weekend.”
When asked where he believed Mercedes went wrong this weekend, Russell said, “We can really put it down to tyres, because the car is the same as what we have had for the past four or five races.”
“Here, if it weren’t for a fantastic start, we would have both been outside the points. In some of those races, we may have been fighting for the win or had a car that could have won.”
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