Hamilton: Driving ability not enough to make up for W14 deficit

Lewis Hamilton says he's trying his best but insists his driving ability isn't enough to bridge Mercedes' gap to Red Bull.

Mercedes' performance has improved since the beginning of the summer on the back of the team's upgrades, with Hamilton achieving podiums in Spain, Canada and at his home race at Silverstone, while the seven-time world champion also claimed pole position in Hungary.

While Mercedes now appears to be the second fastest team behind Red Bull, it's deficit to the latter remains significant, even despite Hamilton's best efforts.

"I'm always trying to rely on my driving ability to make up for the deficit, but it's not been ultimately enough in a lot of places," he said last month.

"If you look at the race in Silverstone, you may not have seen it, but we were equal in time until Turn 13 to Max on a qualifying lap. Then we just lost the performance and speed after that."

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At Spa, both Hamilton and Mercedes teammate George Russell suffered from a return of porpoising on the Brackley's squad's W14, a phenomenon which the team's engineers believes was rooted in a set-up deficiency.

Hamilton suggested that Mercedes is still in the process of understanding the inner workings of its car following its most recent aero updates.

"The thing we can't see is the airflow throughout the car and they're [Mercedes' engineers] just limited.

"All the vortices would blow your mind if you saw what's happening underneath the car, which is a lot different to the previous generations of cars.

"Working through that just takes time and also you're very limited resources as well so you have to be careful which decisions you make."

Mercedes' development work is also conditioned by its wind tunnel testing and CFD limitations as dictated by Formula 1's Aerodynamic Testing Regulations.

"If you go full steam ahead in a direction, you could lose weeks of development and it could be tenths of performance.

"So they [engineers] have to be very methodical in the way they go through that process."

Mercedes chief technical officer Mike Elliott echoed Hamilton's comments about the team's learning endeavor which will have a big impact on the development of next year's car.

"In terms of what we’re trying to learn, what we’re trying to achieve, I think we can get that learning on this year’s car," said the British engineer.

"We’ve got to put the focus into the winter development, making sure we’ve understood all the lessons we can from this year’s car and then turn that into the right things for next year.

"I’d like to think we’ve sort of got ourselves into the right place for the winter.

"I think there’s still learning we can do, and there’s still P2 to fight for in the championship, so we’ll keep developing. But obviously our prime focus now is next year’s car."

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