After a spectacular sprint win around the Shanghai International Circuit, Lewis Hamilton struggled to find a similar pace in the SF-25 for qualifying and the feature race on Sunday.
Hamilton defied expectations on Friday and Saturday of the Chinese Grand Prix race weekend. He took the sprint role, showing a pace that no one had seen coming from the Ferrari. Then came the sprint race. He held off a hungry Max Verstappen hunting him down to take Ferrari’s first sprint win.
However, this fell apart for the prancing horses after the sprint race. They struggled to find any pace beyond lining up 5th and 6th on the grid for Sunday’s race. They finished in the same positions but the weekend went from bad to worse with a double disqualification hitting Leclerc and Hamilton.
Hamilton was disqualified over excessive plank wear. Charles Leclerc faced disqualification over his SF-25 being 1 kg underweight.
Dirty air?
Lando Norris came home second in Sunday’s race behind his teammate Oscar Piastri. When talking to media post-race about his struggles with getting close to Piastri, he referenced Hamilton’s advantage in the sprint.
He said, “As we saw yesterday, Hamilton in the lead was fast. It’s easier when you’re leading because you don’t have dirty air and have more grip. That makes the race easier.”
“It might sound far, but even at three seconds, you start to feel that effect.”
He noted that one of his own biggest struggles from the race was trying to get away from Geroge Russell’s Mercedes which meant suffering in his teammate’s dirty air.
He said, “To pull away from George, I had to push in dirty air, and when you’re doing a one-stop, you wonder whether the tyres will last. I felt like my pace was really good, but I couldn’t push as much as I wanted.”
One of Hamilton’s biggest struggles in Sunday’s race was the tyre wear on the SF-25 which led to him falling behind his teammate and forced him into a second pit stop.
Set-up changes
While Norris blames the Ferrari’s struggles on dirty air, Hamilton shifted the focus to the set-up changes the team made ahead of Saturday’s qualifying.
He told Sky F1, “I’m glad that we tried, I’m glad that we tried something. I was struggling with performance.”
“Basically, we had a pretty decent car in the sprint, and then we made some changes, because we’re trying to move forward and improve the car, and we made it quite a bit worse going into qualifying, and then it was even worse in the race.“
Hamilton breifly touched on how bad his tyre wear had been throughout the race, noting that even on brand new tyres in the final stint he was lapping around the same times as Max Verstappen. Who had done the one-stop.
He said, “The pit stop is too long here, it’s a lot of seconds to catch up, and they were still going fast at the end, like Max was doing something similar to me, and I had much fresher tyres, so wasn’t great.”
Ferrari will be looking to take come back stronger in Japan after an incredibly disappointing opening two rounds for the Maranello team. They currently find themselve sixth in the Contructors’ Championship, 61 points behind McLaren and behind the liked of Williams and Aston Martin.
