Lewis Hamilton spoke after qualifying seventh at Suzuka (Image: Sky Sports)
Both Lewis Hamilton and George Russell were not competitive for pole position during the Japanese Grand Prix qualifying session, as the Mercedes cars lagged significantly behind Max Verstappen and his formidable Red Bull in terms of performance.
Lewis Hamilton doubled down on his desire for a change of concept to his Mercedes car after an underwhelming qualifying at Suzuka.
The seven-time world champion will start the Japanese Grand Prix seventh. He out-qualified team-mate George Russell who was one place further back, but was behind the Red Bull, Ferrari and McLaren cars.
Reacting to that session, he explained what his car was missing. “Yesterday was a bad day. Each weekend we are having, out of the three days there is at least one bad day,” said the Brit.
“The balance didn’t feel great yesterday, we did some changes and good work overnight, and the car has felt generally really nice today. It has been nice to drive through P3, so I’ve been feeling much more confident.
“Then, in qualifying, I was giving it everything but that seven tenths deficit we have in sector one, it’s all rear end. Our car has loads of load on the front and not as much as we need on the rear. So we’re a really long way down on that and for me, it’s 100 per cent clear that’s [a concept issue] and we have got to make sure we change that for next year, which hopefully we will.”
For Russell, P8 was about what he had expected. He said: “Today was a fair representation of how we perform on circuits that have similar characteristics to Suzuka. There’s a large range of corners where we have plenty of high-speed and some very low-speed turns too.
“Our car isn’t the strongest across the full range of corners, so we have been struggling a little more here, particularly in sector one. We saw last week in Singapore that if we can find the sweet spot of the car on tracks requiring high downforce then we can fight at the front. That is not the case here.”
Neither of the Mercedes drivers ever threatened to come close to a pole position charge. In truth, no-one did with Max Verstappen more than half-a-second clear of his nearest competitor after a monster final lap at the end of Q3.
Sky Sports pundit Karun Chandhok looked awestruck as he gave his verdict on the Dutchman’s performance. He said: “I’m still breathless watching that. I think that was one of the great qualifying laps we’ve seen in F1 history. There’s not much left on the table.
“The detail with which he drove, pinching little bits down on the entry to Spoon Curve, 130R, not using all the width – he thought about every detail and, to me, that’s a driver who is ahead of the car. Christian was saying that’s one of the special laps and he’s right. If they didn’t have Max in the car, they’d be on the second row of the grid.”
