After winning the past two rounds in the Red Bull Ring and Silverstone, Mercedes anticipated a drop In performance at the Hungaroring, as it’s technical nature and medium-speed corners are a weak point of their car.
This culminated in a disappointing qualifying session, as the team struggled to deliver a consistent performance. George Russell exited during Q1, qualifying seventeenth, while Lewis Hamilton narrowly avoided elimination in Q2 by 0.010 seconds as he had a lot of snaps on his attempt, eventually ending up fifth in Q3.
Hamilton explained how the car has been far off the level of Red Bull and McLaren, complaining about the balance.
The seven-time World Champion had a very rare spin in FP3, and the W15 looked extremely nervy during Q2 in particular.
“I’ve struggled this weekend with the car, particularly in the heat it’s been really, really difficult to find a balance where the car is not snappy.
“If you look at the Red Bull and the McLaren, they just never have the oversteer. The car is just on rails. For us, the heat makes it worse.
“When we started qualifying and it was cooler, we were in a much better place. As soon as it started to dry and get hotter, then we struggled. Not ideal.
“Not great for George because he was looking better at least than me in free practice.”
Hamilton was 0.157s slower than Sainz in Q3. The Brit believes P4 might have been possible if they ran slightly later in the session, before the red flag was thrown following Tsunoda’s crash.
“I think we could have maybe gone a tenth or two quicker if we’d gone out later for example.
“The track is continuously ramping up, but we definitely couldn’t have done what the guys up ahead have done.”
Since the introduction of ground-effect cars, Hamilton’s performance has fallen away somewhat in qualifying. The 104-time race winner himself acknowledged this struggle at the British Grand Prix, where he won for the first time since Jeddah 2021.
Andrew Shovlin, the team’s trackside engineering director, explained on Friday that the new generation of car is “not suiting” Hamilton’s style and revealed he has been “working on how he drives”.
Hamilton conceded he is working very hard at it, but the combination of tyre struggles and how difficult the W15 is to drive is hurting him and how he likes to drive an F1 car.
“It’s just with these tyres. For some reason, they don’t like the way that I drive on a single lap.
“I’ve sucked in qualifying for quite a while and I’m still working on it to try and improve. At some stage it will come, I’ve just got to keep working on it.
“I would say in my career, I’ve never really had massive problems adapting to tyres. But I’m not sure it’s necessarily tyres, I think it’s the type of car.
“The car is very… It’s more on a knife-edge than ever and it doesn’t like it when you brake late and deep and make a corner a V.
“You have to brake early and roll the speed in and I hate that. That’s just not me. It’s not my kind of way of driving the car. I find that really frustrating.”
