Lewis Hamilton has not held back in his assessment of his below-par qualifying performance at the F1 Bahrain GP.
Lewis Hamilton has been consistently behind team-mate Charles Leclerc all weekend in Bahrain. This trait continued in qualifying. Leclerc initially secured 3rd in Q3. However, he was promoted to the front row after a grid drop for George Russell. Hamilton, meanwhile, could only manage 9th. The gap between him and Leclerc was over six-tenths of a second.
Speaking to the media after qualifying, Hamilton praised his team-mates performance, while criticising his own.
“On a positive our car is clearly a lot better than what I’m delivering with it and Charles [Leclerc] did a great job with it today, so big apologies to the team for not doing the job,” Hamilton said.
While speaking to Sky Sports F1, Hamilton revealed the detail behind a brief and succinct message tohis team.
Stating I’m sorry” after his last lap in Q3, Hamilton confirmed the message related to his inability to extract the maximum from his car.
“It was just about my performance, my poor performance. There’s no reason, I’m just not doing the job.”
Charles Leclerc “didn’t expect” strong Q3 in Bahrain
However, Leclerc, on the other side of the Ferrari garage, could not hide his delight at his performance. He hinted at more performance to come from from the SF-25 in the race and following weekends.
“Honestly, I didn’t expect P3,” he said prior to Russell’s penalty. “I knew that in Q3 there was some lap time, I knew that in Q1 and Q2 I just had to be patient and wait for the track to come towards me in Q3, which was a bit tricky because at the beginning of Q3 everything felt really bad with the old tyres, but then as soon as we put the new tyres [on] it was quite a bit better.
“Im happy, I did not expect it but I think it’s a result of [how] we explored quite a lot of extreme set-ups in the last few weekends and it felt like I found my way a little bit, and little by little I hope there will be more performance to extract from this car in the weekends to come.”
Upgrades working in Bahrain
The SF-25 features a substantial floor upgrade this weekend. Although Hamilton failed to extract the gains from the new parts, Leclerc was delighted with what he called “small gains”.
“The team have pushed like crazy to try and bring upgrades here. I don’t think it’s the best track to have these upgrades done but it’s always good, it’s a small gain but it’s not a big one,” he said.
“Hopefully next week it will be a bit more of a step. But again, I think if we are P3 today, especially considering such fine margins with P4, the upgrades helped.”
