Lewis Hamilton has rued lost opportunities during Sprint Qualifying for the Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix as his pace fell away in the final minutes of SQ3.
Despite the limited on-track time, Hamilton and Ferrari looked to be in contention for pole position for the Sprint Race, hitting the ground running, finishing fourth in practice.
This momentum continued into SQ1 and SQ2, the SF-26 performing well on the medium tyres, with Hamilton featuring towards the top of the timesheets.
However, the seven-time world champion’s outlook changed dramatically in SQ3, once all cars fitted soft tyres.
Hamilton’s pace dramatically dropped off, his laps affected by front wheel locking, seeing him slide down the order to finish the session in seventh.
After the session, he complained of the sudden decline in performance, revealing the car did not give him confidence.
“We didn’t really know what to expect, I’d hoped that it would be better but yeah, the car didn’t feel particularly great,” Hamilton said to media, including Motorsport Week.
The Briton then confirmed Ferrari entered the session with a degree of ambguity, uncertain if the raft of new upgrades would work.
“I have no idea,” he responded. I thought we would be stronger than we were today.
“We’ll have to do some work overnight to try and figure out why we’re not that quick.
“I was hopeful coming here, positive that we would be much higher but it’s not meant to be.”
Charles Leclerc suffers same issues as Lewis Hamilton at F1 Miami GP
Teammate Charles Leclerc concurred with Hamilton’s assessment, adding rivals upgrades may have worked better.
“The upgrades are fine, it’s just that everybody brought upgrades,” he said.
“We kind of expected that situation where Mercedes is probably still the car to beat. McLaren did a very big step forward. I felt like they didn’t really optimise their first races of the season. They were always there but they didn’t put everything together.
“On our side, today particularly we struggled with tyres. The medium was working very well but on the softs it wasn’t a nice feeling. So we’ve got to look at it.
“We know that on the race pace we are stronger but in terms of qualifying, there is still some work to be done.”
Ferrari were brought crashing down to Earth in SQ3, with the race on now to understand why its upgrades did not deliver in the first session where it counted Miami.
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