Mercedes will work to resolve Sochi problems, says Lewis Hamilton
Lewis Hamilton says that Mercedes has a lot of work to do to understand the problems he faced through the Russian GP weekend.
Hamilton struggled to get his tires into the right operating window, although the situation was much improved for qualifying. In the race itself he was compromised by high power unit temperatures, which affected his performance. He spent the whole race in fourth place, unable to match the pace of the cars ahead.
“I can’t explain it right now, but we’ll do some work over this week to fully understand it,” he said. “We have some theories about how it felt in the race and qualifying, but as I said lots of work will be done to figure it out.
“The car was exactly the same in the race. Friday was a lot different, and going into Saturday and Sunday the car was night and day different in the opposite direction. And in the race obviously I had overheating. I think I could have kept up with the guys ahead. But I should have been further up with better pace in general, and that was lacking from Saturday onwards.”
He admitted that even without the temperature problem, he would have struggled.
“I was slow from yesterday, so that doesn’t really change. I think I could kind of match those guys’ times at the front maybe, but whether I would have lasted as long, probably not with the setup that I had. Then with the backing off for the temperature, it was losing seven-tenths, whatever it was, maybe a second, with that.”
