Hamilton disturbed by 'crazy' one second gap to Red Bull

Lewis Hamilton will start tomorrow's Japanese Grand Prix from seventh on the grid, after finishing just over a second slower than the pole position lap posted by Red Bull's Max Verstappen.

"We did some great work overnight and the changes we made felt good in FP3," he commented afterward. "The car has generally felt nice to drive today. That was a relief as yesterday was a bad day. We typically have at least one suboptimal day each weekend, so Friday was likely that."

While the outcome was a definite improvement for Hamilton from his Friday practice performance, the size of the gap between himself and Verstappen left him concerned about Mercedes' prospects for the rest of 2023.

"Unfortunately we’re not quick enough," he told Sky Sports F1 at Suzuka. “We’ve just got to keep working away. We’re a long way away on rear downforce so that’s why we’re so slow in the first sector.

"The laps felt really good," he said. "[But] we are one second away. It’s like, crazy. At this point to still be a second down on a track like this is definitely worrying for us as a team.

• Read also: Verstappen flies to Japan pole, Piastri on front row

"In qualifying I was giving it everything but that seven-tenths deficit that we have in sector one is all rear end,” he told Sky. “Our car has loads of load on the front and not as much as we need on the rear. We’re a long way down on that."

Hamilton has recently made no secret of his dislike of the current Mercedes design concept and the need to make dramatic changes to the chassis going into 2024.

"We have a very peaky car. When we talk about knife-edge, it's literally like trying to balance a knife on its tip. And it's that car, it's impossible.

"So it is never perfectly balanced, it's one way or the other, you either oversteer or you've got massive understeer, you can never get in the middle.

"But you try and get it as close as you can to the middle. But it's very, very hard to do each weekend. But once I do get it into a decent place, this is where I qualify.

"For me it’s 100 per cent clear that it’s concept, and we’ve got to make sure we change that for next year - which hopefully we will," he said, acknowledging that this would still leave Mercedes behind their rivals.

"There’s a steep gap that we have to close for next year but you’ve seen what the Astons did coming into this year, so they can make big steps," he pointed out.

"We’ve seen what the McLaren have done this year by going down the Red Bull route - they’re now ahead of us here on a track like this."

Hamilton's team mate George Russell will line up alongside him on the fourth row startting from P8, and agreed with the seven time champion's analysis that Suzuka was not a good circuit for the W14.

"Today was a fair representation of how we perform on circuit that have similar characteristics to Suzuka," Russell explained. "There's a large range of corners where we have plenty of high-speed and some very low speed turns too.

"Our car isn't the strongest across the full range of corners, so we have been struggling a little more here, particularly in sector one.

"We saw last week in Singapore that if we can find the sweet spot of the car on tracks requiring high downforce then we can fight at the front; but that's not the case here.

"We did find some gains, but ultimately our performance today can mainly be attributed to the corner speed range we see here at Suzuka," suggested Mercedes' trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin.

"Over the course of the year, we've done a good job of adding performance in the lower speed corners. However here, and in particular that first sector, you need a lot of downforce in a certain ride height range.

"The W14 isn't the strongest car in that area and that helps explain our deficit today," he acknowledged.

"Our nearest competitors in the championship are Ferrari. We will have an eye on them strategically tomorrow as they line up ahead of us, and hopefully we can be in a race with them.

"We came here thinking that tyre degradation would be high," he added. "Hopefully we can exploit that. We will ultimately find out in that first stint how the degradation is looking and its impact on the race."

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