Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin believes that Lewis Hamilton’s struggles in qualifying in recent years are rooted in F1’s current generation of ground-effect cars that are “not suiting his style”.
Despite holding the record for the most pole positions in F1 with 104, Hamilton has managed to top qualifying only once since the introduction of the new cars in 2022.
This season, the seven-time world champion finds himself trailing his Mercedes teammate George Russell 10-2 in the Saturday afternoon single-lap exercise.
“George has always set a very high bar in qualifying,” Shovlin explained. “And as soon as he was in F1, he was impressing.
“Even in the Williams, he was doing some pretty impressive qualifying sessions. So we know that he's very quick,” Shovlin said on Friday.
"Lewis hasn't disguised the fact that Saturdays were his tough day. He's struggled with this whole generation of car, really, not suiting his style. He's been working on how he drives.”
For Hamilton, the crux of the issue appears to be specific to the demands of a single lap, as Shovlin explained.
“It's particularly he’s struggled on the single lap,” he said. “So his long run pace is always there. And that's been really useful.
“It's more just the way that he wants to attack a corner. When you do that, then the car would snap to oversteer. You start to build tyre temperature.
“So most of our work has been trying to give him a car that you can drive the very attacking style, extract the lap time out of it without it just sort of breaking away on the way in and catching him by surprise.”
While Mercedes has addressed the problem to some extent, Shovlin admits there's room for further improvement.
"We had a huge amount of work trying to get the car to: a) be quicker – it just hasn't been quick enough – but also with a handling balance that the drivers can actually attack the lap on Saturday. So we've made progress.
“Recently, George has outqualified Lewis by some fairly fine margins. So it's great for the team that Lewis is back up there and he'll be pushing on. But yeah, we'll keep working on that. And I'm sure that we'll see hopefully some more Lewis pole positions as well.”
As Mercedes continues to refine the car and adjust to the challenges presented by the current generation of F1 cars, the hope remains that Hamilton will regain his dominant form in qualifying sessions.
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