Hamilton buoyed by Zandvoort pace in ‘confusing’ car

Lewis Hamilton says Mercedes can be encouraged by its display at Zandvoort after conceding that its “confusing” car is much better suited to the circuit layout.

Mercedes was significantly off the pace during qualifying seven days at Spa-Francorchamps but was in the mix for the leading positions at Zandvoort.

A late yellow flag for a spinning Sergio Perez compromised Hamilton’s final Q3 lap and while he agreed a pole tilt would have been “highly optimistic” he suggested a front row was possible.

“Much happier coming into this weekend, to have a car that’s potentially fighting but I just don’t understand,” he said, after qualifying fourth.

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“One weekend it can be so far off and the next weekend all of a sudden we’re right there, so it’s confusing for sure.

“But lots of positives to take from today. And I think if we hadn’t had the yellow flag would have been hopefully, potentially fighting for the front rows. So that’s really positive.

“I hope that, the deficit that we normally have, even though we close the deficit in a single lap, if that can then reflect to our race pace, that’d be awesome.”

Hamilton added that Mercedes feels it has a strong handle on why its W13 struggled for outright performance last weekend.

“It has to do with aero curvatures and all sorts that I don’t know why we didn’t see it going into the last race because there were things we could have done differently and it could have been a little bit better at least,” he said.

“Not two seconds quicker but why we are missing that. So we’re just looking at things of how we can make sure we’re better prepared from race to race.

“But just generally, this type of track, just putting the car on it, just works much better with the right height and so.”