Lewis Hamilton achieved his seventh top five result in the past eight races. Starting from P6, he became the best finishing Mercedes driver due to the damage on the picked up by his teammate George Russell at turn 1.
Mercedes’s pace didn’t appear as positive or as impressive as it had been at Spa and Silverstone for example, and even during practice earlier in the weekend, a circumstance which didn’t allow the British driver to attack Carlos Sainz.
The seven-time world champion went over what happened as he had a relatively quiet race, which left him rather unsatisfied following the two victories achieved in 2024 so far, citing his less than impressive qualifying as well as tyre management:
“My qualifying performance at the end yesterday, and then just race pace. We had more degradation, just generally lacking one or two tenths in the race.
“I probably could have finished ahead of one Ferrari, if I had been further ahead [in qualifying].”
Asked about the feeling he was left after driving his W15 for the 53 laps of the Italian round, Hamilton mentioned that while the car had felt fine, it had presented unusual degradation problems, especially compared to the performance shown earlier in the weekend.
“Yeah, it was okay. It was nothing special. Again, it’s just like you’re either graining in the left front or graining in the left rear. We just didn’t have the pace. We have to go and look and try and understand why.
“Also, because we looked better on Friday than we did. We got almost slower through the weekend, or others got faster, or those two light and they were heavy. Who knows? Some weekends we get it right and some weekends we don’t,” concluded the Brit, hoping to have the chance to secure yet another win in his final year with Mercedes.
There is however a silver lining, due to the fact that improvements and small fixes to their challengers will come from Mercedes over the span of the next few weekends
“Yeah, there’s definitely some performance to come over the course of the next few races. We’ll find out when we get there, but we do have small bits.
“I don’t know if we have anything huge coming, but hopefully we have small bits.”
Hamilton trusts the team he has been driving for 11 seasons, and believes they have the ability and potential to bring the right upgrades which will allow him to join the battle to achieve yet another win this season.
“Yeah, I’m hoping that we can make some progress. There’ll be some tracks where we’ll be a little bit better than we are here. I hope that we have another chance to fight for a win at some stage,” he added, looking forward to the next round in Azerbaijan already.
