The Japanese Grand Prix weekend didn’t yield much joy for Lewis Hamilton but the Ferrari star is optimistic heading to Bahrain after finally identifying his car’s issue
Lewis Hamilton hopes to kick-start his Ferrari career in Bahrain next weekend after finding “something underperforming” on his car. The Brit produced one of the very few overtakes at the Japanese Grand Prix when he shot past rookie Isack Hadjar in the early stages.
But that was only for seventh place which was where he finished to mark another underwhelming result for the seven-time champion. Adjusting to life at Ferrari has been tough but Hamilton was optimistic as he revealed a persistent problem with his car has now been identified.
He said: “I did the best I could today, generally lacking performance compared to all the cars that are up ahead of me, particularly Mercedes, McLaren and obviously the Red Bull.
“We’ve found something on the car that’s been underperforming for the last three races, so I’m really hoping when that’s fixed I’ll start getting a bit better results.
“I’m losing just over a tenth [of a second] a lap with this issue we have, so I’m hoping in the next race it’s fixed. They’re aware of it and they don’t know why [it is happening] so, as I said, when the new component comes, hopefully it’ll be gone and it’ll be the same across cars.
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“Considering that, I’m relatively happy with the race pace that I did have, given what I had. But otherwise, good performance from the team. Myself and Riccardo [Adami, his race engineer] I think did a really good job, the engineers and mechanics also did a great job.”
With overtaking difficult at Suzuka on Sunday, the result of qualifying became even more important. The top six finished in the same order in which they started with Max Verstappen taking his first win of the year from Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri joining his McLaren team-mate on the podium.
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Qualifying was Hamilton’s weakness in his final season with Mercedes and he knows it is something he needs to work on to help him start firing at Ferrari. He said: “Clearly it’s really important to get a good qualifying and I’m not extracting the best out of the tyres, so that’s something I’ll work on.”
Team-mate Charles Leclerc qualified and finished the race in fourth and has largely been able to extract more performance than Hamilton so far this year. But the Monegasque warned that the team will not be in the fight for victories unless upgrades in the pipeline have a significant impact.
He said: “It was a bit of an annoying race – I was completely on my own. The guys in front were too quick. In the first stint I thought maybe there was something to do, but then they started to push more and they were just faster.
“It’s disappointing because when you put everything together like we’ve done this weekend, I think the balance was in the right place, there’s just not enough performance in the car. For now, we’ve just got to maximise the points, which is what we have done, and I hope that later on in the season we can fight for better.”
