Mercedes mystified by Hamilton's qualifying woes

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The Mercedes team has admitted that it doesn't yet know exactly why Lewis Hamilton struggled so badly in qualifying in Monaco on Saturday.

Valtteri Bottas made it through to Q3 and was just a whisker off the front row. In stark contrast, Hamilton failed to progress to the final round. He will start the race from a provisional 13th place after penalties are factored in.

"Two very different qualifying results today for Lewis and Valtteri," conceded Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff. "With Lewis, you could see even from the TV pictures that he was struggling with the car.

"[He] nearly lost it a couple of times in qualifying.

"We don't know at the moment what went wrong," Wolff admitted. "We took a false turn with the set-up on Thursday. Since then, although we tried to retrace our steps, we never got it back on track for him."

Hamilton's final flying lap attempt was thwarted by yellow flags at the end of Q2 for an accident involving McLaren's Stoffel Vandoorne.l.

"Of course he was unfortunate with the yellow flag for Vandoorne in Q2, as he was on course to make it through the session," agreed Wolff.

"But the car never felt good for him after FP1 and that made it tough to put together the laps.

"Tomorrow's race will clearly be a case of damage limitation for him and trying to maximise his points score. But he will fight to the last lap."

Raikkonen on Monaco pole after nightmare qualifying for Hamilton

"We could not get it right on Lewis's car," contributed the team's non-executive chairman Niki Lauda. "Therefore it was a disastrous qualifying.

"On Bottas' car it was better. Very close to second place. So with him we're happy - with Lewis, not at all," Lauda told Sky Sports F1. "We'll have to analyse it. We have no idea.

"We have to really check carefully what the difference is between the two cars. Why the whole set-up worked on one car, and not on the other."

The team's technical director James Allison was just as mystified by the situation.

"Clearly we have a significant job of work on our hands to understand why the car was so difficult to drive for Lewis," he said.

"[We'll have] to figure out what we can do with the limited adjustments we can make, and the slightly greater freedom in race strategy, to recover as good a result as possible tomorrow."

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Gallery: All the pictures from Saturday in Monaco

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.