Lewis Hamilton felt the pace of his Mercedes W10 was deteriorating over the course of Saturday's qualifying session ahead of tomorrow’s British Grand Prix at Silverstone.
The runaway championship leader felt that his car was returning to how it was behaving during Friday's practice sessions. He felt that the changeable weather also played a role in losing out on pole position to team-mate Valtteri Bottas by just 0.006s.
But, speaking after the qualifying session, Hamilton was reluctant to change any part of his race setup as he felt the car was now behaving far better than during the longer runs on Friday.
"The setup suits the race trim best and yesterday we really did struggle with it on a single lap," Hamilton explained. "[And] of course we are trying to improve it over the evening and into today [although] it felt great going into FP3 and it felt really good at the start of the qualifying session.
“But it actually deteriorated as we got through the session, it got harder, and harder, it went back towards the similar problems to what we had yesterday as you saw.
"It is also windy but the race trim is still good and I didn’t want to move from the setup that I had, or too far away, because it worked well on the long run yesterday so fingers crossed the pace in the race should be quite good but again it depends on the position we are in and how the wind is and other factors.”
During Hamilton's first run in Q3, he made a mistake going into Brooklands and eventually lost out to Bottas by three tenths at the end of the lap.
When asked if this affected his final run and if his qualifying performances were taking a hit in 2019, he replied: "It doesn’t really matter at the end of the day as you can’t go back, all you can do is look forward and Valtteri did the job so congratulations to him.
"It wasn’t the best of qualifying sessions. It is a long race tomorrow so we will see how we can convert the position I am to progress forward. I think the long run yesterday was good so I hope that I am able to utilise the tyre advantage we have starting on the mediums. We will try to do a good job tomorrow."
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