Lewis Hamilton has expressed his concerns after a difficult start to the weekend at Suzuka and admitted that he no chance of winning the Japanese Grand Prix. The seven-time world champion was miles off the pace throughout the morning’s free practice sessions.
Hamilton finished on the podium at the last race in Singapore, inheriting P3 from George Russell on the final lap of the race after his Mercedes team-mate collided with the barriers after clipping the outside wall on the run down to turn ten.
Unfortunately for the legendary Brit, it looks like the Japanese Grand Prix will be a much tougher weekend with neither Mercedes driver coming close to matching the pace of the resurgent Max Verstappen.
“It was a really bad day, to be honest,” Hamilton said after FP2. “A real struggle out there. [We were] a long way off, two seconds off in the first session and over a second off in the second. We’re working away at just trying to fix the car’s balance.
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“We’ll work on it overnight and turn it around for tomorrow, but we definitely won’t be winning this weekend! If I in particular can move further up the order so I can at least back up George, who did a not-such-a-bad lap… yeah, tough one.
“It’s figuring out what is wrong. We were much closer in the last race [Singapore] but we didn’t have many high-speed corners, only one, but not as high-speed as the corners here.”
Hamilton has good reason to be concerned about his team’s pace heading into Saturday’s practice session and qualifying. The seven-time world champion was two seconds slower than Verstappen in FP1, albeit with the Dutchman doing fast-paced short runs on the soft compound tyres.
It got even worse for Hamilton in FP2 with the Briton failing to claw back any real performance. While the gap came down to 1.1 seconds from Verstappen, Hamilton was still comfortably outside of the top ten, setting him up for a worrying approach to qualifying.
Addressing his feelings about the car, Hamilton continued: “I had a lack of confidence in the car and that contributed to our struggles. It was difficult to find the right balance and we didn’t manage to get on top of it by the end of FP2. The tyres were overheating and that left us quite far off the top of the timing sheets.”
