Mercedes has claimed that Lewis Hamilton’s one-lap struggles this season have derived from his driving style not gelling with Formula 1’s current ground effect cars.
Hamilton stands clear as the sport’s most potent ever qualifier, having acquired a record 104 pole positions through his glittering career with McLaren and Mercedes.
However, the Briton has encountered trouble during this term to match team-mate George Russell and has been out-qualified 10 times across the opening 12 rounds.
Expanding upon his issues earlier on this season, Hamilton attributed his continuous setbacks under single-lap conditions to the peakiness from Pirelli’s compounds.
But Mercedes Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin reckons that Hamilton’s woes have been prevalent since F1 returned to ground effect aero back in 2022.
Nevertheless, Shovlin is adamant that the deficit between the two Mercedes drivers has been minimal across recent races as the W15 has become more competitive.
“George has always set a very high bar in qualifying,” Shovlin acknowledged. “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 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 we’ll keep working on that. And I’m sure that we’ll see, hopefully, some more Lewis pole positions as well.”
Shovlin has explained that Hamilton’s more attacking approach at the wheel hasn’t been suited to extracting the maximum lap time from the current generation cars.
“Well, particularly, he’s struggled on the single lap, so his long-run pace is always there, and that’s been really useful,” he added.
“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.”
Mercedes enters the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend aiming to claim a third consecutive win amid back-to-back victories at the past two rounds in Austria and Britain.
But while the squad has taken pole position at the Hungaroring on the previous two visits, Shovlin suspects Mercedes will be on the back foot at a rear-limited circuit.
“Well, it’s probably a bit of a long shot,” he said regarding its chances. “Silverstone definitely suited the car. It’s a more front-limited track and it was cooler conditions.
“The thing where we’ve still got the kind of question mark on performance is rear-limited circuits in hot conditions.
“It’s going to be very hot on Sunday. So that’s what we’re working on. But I wouldn’t put us as favourites here.
“So we’re going to learn quite a lot about the car and its ultimate competitiveness here in Hungary. Yeah, I mean, it’s a good circuit to test at.
“And when you’re trying to focus on one area of performance, if that’s rear overheating, the best place to learn and understand your issues is a circuit that exacerbates that problem.
“Even if we’d prefer all of them be like Silverstone, but they’re not. And it’s a good place for us to work on that problem.”
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