Hamilton hits 14-year low in Australian GP qualifying

lEWIS Hamilton delivered a damning assessment of his Mercedes car, bemoaning that it “messes with the mind” after he was left impotent in qualifying for the australian Grand Prix yesterday, failing to make into Q3, his worst return over the single lap in australia for 14 years.

Hamilton could manage only 11th place in Melbourne, where Max Verstappen eased to another pole with a dominant drive for Red Bull while the seven-time champion once more had to fight what seems a wilfully petulant vehicle.

The British driver was left unhappy with a performance from the Mercedes he felt was hard to nail down at albert Park. He had been confident in third practice and was a 10th of a second off the front in the fourth. However, Hamilton could then not repeat that pace in qualifying, leaving him disappointed and perplexed.

“The inconsistency in the car really messes with the mind,” he said.

“There is a long list of things to fix. our car is on a knife edge. In the afternoon the wind picks up and the car becomes unstable, but the others can pick their pace up in qualifying and I am not sure why. It didn’t feel the same in qualifying from practice even though we had lighter fuel. It is not a great feeling for everyone in the team but we will keep working away.”

Mercedes were optimistic at the start of the season that their entirely new design direction would deliver a stronger car, and one that was at least matching expected parameters, but for the third year in succession they have been left scratching their heads as to why it is not performing as expected.

lewis Hamilton, wearing his helmet and in his all black race suit, walks down the pit lane during qualifying.

“It is three years in a row where I have had a similar feeling,” said Hamilton. “If we can make the car more consistent maybe we can be more competitive but there is a lot of work to do.”

The seven-time champion will join Ferrari next season and on the form of these opening meetings a long slog in the Mercedes lies ahead with 22 more races to come. He qualified in ninth at the season-opener in Bahrain and eighth at the second round in Saudi arabia, and has been out-qualified in each meeting by his teammate George Russell who was seventh in australia. He has only eight points to Russell’s 18 this season.

Since the new regulations were introduced in 2022 Mercedes have struggled to master them to even close to the extent Red Bull has achieved. Hamilton, who until 2022 had taken a win in every season of his career in F1 since his debut in 2007, has now gone without a victory for 57 races, the last at the 2021 Saudi arabian GP. Mercedes have won only once since 2022, indicative of how they have failed to match their rivals.

Their change in design philosophy, adopted very early last season, was expected to solve many of the issues with which they have struggled but most importantly to provide a consistent and stable base from which to develop, the absence of which is clearly of concern to the team. a situation the team principal, Toto Wolff, conceded was not acceptable.

“It’s especially underwhelming because we were within a 10th in final practice,” he said. “The conditions were a little bit different but there is no excuse. We have a car that is difficult, and as much as I am annoyed at myself for saying this for a long time, we just need to continue working on it and trying to get better. It is not because of a lack of trying that we are where we are, but it’s not good enough.”