Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin believes that Lewis Hamilton’s struggles in qualifying lately are rooted in F1’s present era of ground-effect vehicles which are “not suiting his model”.
Regardless of holding the document for essentially the most pole positions in F1 with 104, Hamilton has managed to high qualifying solely as soon as because the introduction of the brand new vehicles in 2022.
This season, the seven-time world champion finds himself trailing his Mercedes teammate George Russell 10-2 within the Saturday afternoon single-lap train.
“George has at all times set a really excessive bar in qualifying,” Shovlin defined. “And as quickly as he was in F1, he was impressing.
“Even within the Williams, he was doing a little fairly spectacular qualifying classes. So we all know that he is very fast,” Shovlin mentioned on Friday.
“Lewis hasn’t disguised the truth that Saturdays had been his powerful day. He is struggled with this entire era of automotive, actually, not suiting his model. He is been engaged on how he drives.”
For Hamilton, the crux of the problem seems to be particular to the calls for of a single lap, as Shovlin defined.
“It is significantly he’s struggled on the only lap,” he mentioned. “So his long term tempo is at all times there. And that is been actually helpful.
“It is extra simply the best way that he desires to assault a nook. If you try this, then the automotive would snap to oversteer. You begin to construct tyre temperature.
“So most of our work has been attempting to provide him a automotive that you may drive the very attacking model, extract the lap day out of it with out it simply type of breaking away on the best way in and catching him unexpectedly.”
Whereas Mercedes has addressed the issue to some extent, Shovlin admits there’s room for additional enchancment.
“We had an enormous quantity of labor attempting to get the automotive to: a) be faster – it simply hasn’t been fast sufficient – but in addition with a dealing with steadiness that the drivers can truly assault the lap on Saturday. So we have made progress.
“Not too long ago, George has outqualified Lewis by some pretty tremendous margins. So it is nice for the group that Lewis is again up there and he’ll be pushing on. However yeah, we’ll maintain engaged on that. And I am certain that we’ll see hopefully some extra Lewis pole positions as nicely.”
As Mercedes continues to refine the automotive and alter to the challenges introduced by the present era of F1 vehicles, the hope stays that Hamilton will regain his dominant type in qualifying classes.
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