Mercedes Head of Trackside Engineering Andre Shovling understands the “root” of Lewis Hamilton’s Formula 1 qualifying frustrations, which reached a boiling point at the Italian Grand Prix.
Hamilton, the all-time leading F1 polesitter with 104 to his name, qualified sixth at Monza last time out, less than two-tenths off of the ultimate pace displayed by McLaren’s Lando Norris.
Despite those tight margins, Hamilton extraordinarily claimed post-session that “I’m not very good, it’s as simple as that. I’m just not very good at qualifying… I clearly have [got bad].”
Meanwhile, Shovlin referenced tight margins and minor slip-ups cost Hamilton a chance at pole around the Temple of Speed.
“I’m sure we could’ve done a bit better,” Shovlin said. “The root of Lewis’ frustrations is evident when you look at the GPS data to see that going into that final corner, we were within half a tenth of Lando and his pole position lap, but then the last corner for Lewis didn’t work out particularly well.
“He lost a bit of time there, and had it not been for that, he could’ve easily been on the front row if not challenging for pole.”
Shovlin added that it was “Not a dissimilar story with George as well, he was going pretty close going into that final corner, it was a bit better for him and that earned him the P3 position.”
Russell has largely had Hamilton’s number in qualifying this year and a slight edge of 0.073s saw him qualify three positions higher.
The Mercedes intra-team qualifying battle comes amid several teams being in the hunt for pole position from race to race.
At each Grand Prix weekend, Mercedes, McLaren, Ferrari and Red Bull scrap for top honours, over one lap and a race distance.
It’s this tight competitive order that Shovlin believes is why drivers must extract the absolute maximum to beat the competition during qualifying.
“What we’ve seen in the recent races is that fights for the front of the grid is actually extending all the way down to P7, P8,” he said.
“You can get so many cars there within two tenths of a second, and that’s the sort of margin where it really comes down to whether the drivers put that lap together.
“And frustratingly for Lewis, he’d shown great pace in Q2, didn’t quite get it right for that final run in Q3, and you can drop all the way down to P6. It’s just how tight it is at the moment.”
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