After having been the protagonist in the last races of the category (winning 2/3), Lewis Hamilton came back from F1’s first summer break of the year to compete with a Mercedes in a race pace that promised.
However, the 39-year-old driver did not find his way past Q2, after leading Q1 for a moment and then finishing third, the Briton found himself eliminated in the second qualifying session, set to start virtually in 12th position, behind Carlos Sainz’ Ferrari.
Speaking afterwards, the seven-time world champion described the session as “a nightmare” with precise and short sentences.
“Yeah, well, difficult session.” Hamilton admitted.
“It’s definitely very, very frustrating, naturally, but it is what it is. It’s kind of the weekend done and I’ll have to move on to next week [at Monza].
“The rain made it tricky in the morning to see what the balance was. With a dry FP3 we may have done a better job of the set-up for Qualifying but performance wasn’t there from me.
“I think we may have changed overnight and then couldn’t see, obviously, in FP3, but is the same for everybody.
“We [Hamilton and Russell] both made set-up changes. I made more.”
The soon-to-be Ferrari driver offered his perspective on how driving the W15 was on the Saturday, explaining the understeer was the biggest problem on the setup chosen for FP3 and Qualifying.
“Yeah, I thought it was massively snappy today. Yesterday was lots of understeer and we tried to dial that out and went too much the other way, but yeah, it was a lot of understeer.”
It was midway through Q1 when an impeding incident occurred between Hamilton and Sergio Pérez, as the Mexican drove his way through a hot lap in the exit of turn 8 and found Hamilton on his way. Perez, annoyed, exclaimed: “For worse than that, I’ve been penalized.”
About the incident, Hamilton confirmed:
“I did absolutely do my best to try and be as far out of the way as possible.”
It has now been confirmed that after the investigation, the race stewards have handed Hamilton a three-place grid penalty for Sunday’s race at Zandvoort, meaning that the Mercedes driver will be starting the Grand Prix P15 on the grid, instead of P12.
When asked about his expectations for a most probably dry race tomorrow, Hamilton admitted while still having a P12 starting position:
“There will be a struggle to get into the top ten probably.”
