Lewis Hamilton expressed disappointment with his Mercedes F1 car, noting its inconsistency despite occasional flashes of potential.
“The spikes of promise seem to disappear,” Hamilton remarked, echoing sentiments reminiscent of past struggles in recent seasons.
At the Australian Grand Prix, Hamilton encountered further frustration as he could only manage an 11th-place qualification, with teammate George Russell securing seventh, outpacing Hamilton for the third consecutive race this season.
Despite showing promise in final practice, where he trailed Charles Leclerc’s pace-setting Ferrari by a mere 0.1 seconds, Hamilton admitted to feeling “flat” following his poorest qualifying performance in Melbourne since 2010.
“Every outing you learn something new,” Hamilton stated. “FP3 felt really good for us, and I felt really optimistic going into qualifying but then, I don’t know if it’s the wind picking up, the wind picked up quite a bit, same as yesterday, and then the car is just so much more on a knife edge.
“It’s three years in a row a similar feeling. But then there’s these spikes of ‘Oh, it could be good’ like this morning. And then it kind of disappears.
“If we can work a way of finding that goodness in the car and making it more consistent and holding onto that, maybe we can be more competitive. But there’s a lot of work we need to do but everyone’s working as hard as they can.”
Hamilton acknowledged that the inconsistencies in the W15 “really messes with the mind.”
Amid Mercedes’ ongoing struggle to grasp the airflow dynamics beneath the car within the current ground-effect regulations, Hamilton finds himself conducting setup experiments to uncover additional performance.
“In 2022, we weren’t splitting [set-ups],” Hamilton further elaborated. “George was doing one thing. I was trying every set-up there was to try and help the team find options and figure out how we could fix it.
“It’s pretty much the same, a little bit similar to this year. I’ve tried lots of different things. But I think this weekend we’re much closer.”
