Lewis Hamilton agrees with Andrew Shovlin with regards to struggles with the tyres of the new generation of F1 cars, especially in qualifying.
The new generation of F1 cars has been a handful to adapt to – more so for the veteran of the sport. After his dominance until 2021 season, Mercedes’ Hamilton faced an uphill task to even claim a win against his name until the 2024 season.
More so his race pace, it is qualifying where he has struggled the most especially considering that he has over 100 poles against his name. While in 2023, Hamilton could match with teammate George Russell with 11 apiece, but 2024 is another picture.
In the 14 races so far, Russell has 10 qualifying battles won against Hamilton who has only four. Mercedes’ Shovlin noted about the struggles for the Brit to adjust and adapt to the car and get the maximum out of it, in terms of the tyre performance.
“George has always set a very high bar in qualifying,” said Shovlin. “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. 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. But 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.
“It’s particularly he [Hamilton] struggled on the single lap. 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,” summed up Shovlin.
Reacting to what his peer said, Hamilton agreed that he has had difficulties in adjusting with the tyres. In fact, it is the type of car which has been troublesome for him to get into the right window and rhythm to extract as much, especially on one lap.
“It is just with these tyres for some reason, I don’t like the way they drive,” said Hamilton to media. “I have sucked in qualifying for quite a while. I am still working at it to try and improve. But at some stage, it will come, just keep working at it. I would say in my career, I would never say I have had massive problems with the tyres.
“But I’m not sure it is necessarily the tyres, I think it is the type of car. The car is more on a knife-edge than ever and it doesn’t like when you brake late, deep and make a corner a ‘v’. You have to brake early, run-off and roll the speed in. I hate that, it’s just not me and not my kind of way of driving the car. I find that really frustrating.”
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