Lewis Hamilton admitted to mental struggles after another disappointing Formula 1 outing as he suffered a Q2 exit at the Brazilian Grand Prix.
The Ferrari driver will start 13th for Sunday’s race at Interlagos as he simply struggled for pace, while team-mate Charles Leclerc qualified up in third.
It continued a disappointing day for Hamilton who only finished seventh in the sprint race, amid an underwhelming season as he is sixth in the championship and 66 points behind Leclerc.
Hamilton was visibly downbeat during his post-qualifying media session in Sao Paulo and when asked how he’s feeling mentally, he said: “Not great, not great. I’ll just do what I can tomorrow.”
The seven-time world champion was extremely short of words, but did reveal that his struggles with maintaining tyre temperatures were behind his early exit.
“I think the execution in terms of the times we got out and everything is fine, it’s just the rears are at a place that I can’t get to temperature for them to stop that,” said Hamilton.
Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari
Photo by: Zak Mauger / LAT Images via Getty Images
He added that he “just couldn’t get the tyres working” and although Hamilton has produced impressive comeback drives in the past, the 40-year-old is not confident for Sunday.
“You can’t overtake,” he claimed. “I’m not expecting anything to be honest. But we’ll see what happens, it’s another write-off weekend I guess.”
Leclerc was more upbeat though, as he qualified just three tenths off polesitter Lando Norris with Andrea Kimi Antonelli splitting the pair, 0.120s ahead of the Ferrari driver.
That was despite a poor sprint qualifying result on Friday, as Leclerc was down in eighth with Hamilton 11th, so the Monegasque was buoyed by the comeback.
“I don’t want to over exaggerate the turnaround that we’ve had because we are only speaking about a tenth and a half, maybe,” said Leclerc.
“But the thing is that this weekend, a tenth and a half means out of Q1 or inside Q3. I think where we did a really good job is by executing everything perfectly from Q1 to Q3.
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari, Lando Norris, McLaren
Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images
“It’s been a very difficult weekend since FP1 and we knew that we will struggle to get to Q2 and then Q3. But we did everything perfect. So I’m very happy about that.”
Leclerc credited his strong qualifying on changes to his SF-25 after finishing fifth in the sprint race.
“We changed, a little bit, the car from this morning and that did a step, that helped us to do a step forward,” he said.
“So, yeah, altogether start P3. I think we should be really satisfied with that because I don’t think any of us expected that after such a difficult beginning of the weekend.”
Additional reporting by Federico Faturos
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