Lewis Hamilton says he and Mercedes “completely missed the ball” and made the W12 “worse than ever” after his qualifying slump in Monaco.
Hamilton was only seventh-best in Saturday’s final practice session and was then never in contention for leading honours during qualifying.
Hamilton wound up seventh overall, seven-tenths of a second adrift of Charles Leclerc, and behind even McLaren’s Lando Norris and AlphaTauri’s Pierre Gasly.
“Today was a question of tyres, the tyres just not working,” he said. “Sliding around.”
Expanding further he said: “There are things that should have been done which haven’t been done. We’ll learn from it and come together stronger in the next race.
“I can’t really [say]. But as I said, from my point it’s a little frustrating, but it is what it is. I can’t really say too much about it.
“Also I don’t want to be critical of team, but behind closed doors, I will be. We’ve got to work harder.”
Hamilton revealed that Mercedes did “lots of changes to the car after FP3, as FP3 was a disaster, and that was from the work done over the last day or so.
“[It was] completely [the] wrong direction, [we] completely missed the ball. Then we made some changes to try and take steps backwards and move the car into a different place and the car was worse than ever. I think we really lost our way from Thursday.”
On the tyre warm-up issue Hamilton confirmed that “definitely we struggle, and it’s magnified here, as it’s a low energy circuit, there’s not many high-speed areas.
“Today was much, much cooler, you saw it get worse over the day. I’m not really sure how Valtteri [Bottas] was able to get his tyres working. I saw a glimpse of grip on that last lap, but it was short-lived. It will be a lot of analysis.
“P7 is not a great place to start here, but I’ll need to do best I can. Damage limitation tomorrow and see if there’s a way to move forward tomorrow.”
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