Lewis Hamilton suffered a dreadful outcome in qualifying for the Australian Grand Prix on Saturday, missing out on the final cut in Melbourne for the first time since 2010.
It came on the back of what Hamilton himself called his worst practice session in a long time on Friday in which he was a distant P18 in the timesheets at the end of FP2.
Qualifying wasn't quite as bad, but missing the cut as he did means Hamilton will start tomorrow's race from P11 on the grid, four places behind his team mate George Russell who did make the cut and will start from seventh.
"The car felt great in FP3. It was much improved from yesterday," Hamilton said after the premature end to his qualifying session. I felt really optimistic going into qualifying, but then the inconsistencies within the car showed up.
"The car is on a knife's edge, and it is difficult as a driver to work around these inconsistencies," he added. "The wind typically picks up here in the afternoon and I think we suffered with that today.
"Every outing you learn something new," Hamilton sighed. "There's these spikes of 'Oh it could be good', like this morning, and then it kind of disappears.
"If we can work a way of finding that goodness in the car and making it more consistent and holding onto that, maybe we can be more competitive.
"It's not a great feeling for anyone in the team at the moment but we will keep working away," he commented. "There's a lot of work we need to do but everyone's working as hard as they can."
This year Hamilton is back to experimenting with big changes to his set-up compared to Russell, which is what they did in 2022 when the younger driver initially joined the team.
"George was doing one thing, I was trying every set-up there was to try and help the team find options and figure out how we could fix it," Hamilton recalled. "It's pretty much the same, a little bit similar to this year.
"George did a good job today to get the car into Q3. I'll be focused on coming back tomorrow and trying to do a better job."
Although Russell has been faring better than Hamilton in the first outings of 2024 in the W15, he was also lamenting how much work lay ahead of the team to get things up to the standard they had been expecting.
"We know where we need to improve the car, and that is in the high-speed corners. Unfortunately there are a decent amount of those here in Melbourne, so this circuit is definitely not playing to our strengths.
"I do think we'll be in a better place tomorrow though when everyone has the fuel in their car," Russell mused. "I think it will be a more exciting race here than we usually see. Ultimately it's the Grand Prix where points are scored."
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff called Saturday "an underwhelming qualifying session" and told Sky Sports F1 that the team had no excuses for underperforming again.
"It is not because a lack of trying that we are where we are, but it is not good enough," he conceded. "As much as I am annoyed myself at saying this for a long time, we will just continue working on it and trying to get better.
"The conditions were a little bit different, but there is no excuse. We have a car that is difficult, and you can be narrowly in or out of the window.
"It is the whole interaction of aerodynamics, mechanics and the tyres. It is not a single element. But we've just got to keep our heads down and push through this.
"It is tricky to be out of the performance window, so we're just going to continue to work on it," he noted, adding that it was an illusion to think that Mercedes could get closer to Red Bull in the short-term.
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