Lewis Hamilton said that the appalling handling of his Mercedes over the opening phase of today's Chinese Grand Prix made him think that he must have damaged the car at the start of the race.
Wet weather qualifying for Saturday's Sprint race had helped to second place, but set-up changed between the end of the Sprint and the start of qualifying for the main race had backfired badly leaving Hamilton starting from P18.
Despite being on soft tyres he lost places when the lights went out. Far from scything through the backmarkers, Hamilton was still only 15th by the time he pitted on lap 9 to change to a set of medium tyres.
"Oh my god, I was the only one I think [to start] on the soft and it fell apart after lap one. It was very difficult," he said afterward.Even after pitting it was still hard work for Hamilton to make progress.
"I thought maybe at the beginning I tapped someone because I have never had so much understeer in my life," Hamilton told the media in the paddock at Shanghai after the race. "I was turning in at slow speed and waiting, waiting, waiting.
"I thought I'd damaged something like some of the others, because there was debris going everywhere at one point," he continued. "But it was just the set-up that I chose.
Hamilton had already acknowledged that the set-up changed he made after the Sprint had been the wrong way to go. He admitted he should have followed the example set by team mate George Russell, who qualified in the top ten and finished P6 on Sunday.
"With better decisions on set-up maybe we would be around where George is, but we just have to keep fighting," he agreed after finishing in ninth having benefitted from the incident between Lance Stroll and Daniel Ricciardo.
"It definitely wasn't better than expected, we expected to be somewhere around there," he told Sky Sports F1. Hamilton is now pinning his hopes on the next set of upgrades to the W15 planned for Miami.
"Hopefully we have some step forward coming in next race," he said. "Until then, we'll be back in a factory next week trying to position the car better for Miami and hopefully we have a better weekend."
As for Russell, he was pleased to pick up two places in the race and felt that sixth was the best that he could have done today given the Mercedes' poor performance.
"Starting P8 and making up a few positions was what we were expecting from today's race," he said. "The result is probably a fair one, and we know we have work to do.
"This weekend, we know where we're falling out," he added. We've had a similar battle with [Fernando] Alonso and [Oscar] Piastri in the last three races, so P6 is about where our car is at present.
"It was an interesting weekend managing to have two different set-ups on the car between Friday and Sunday," he pointed out. "So some info to go through, we just need to dig into the data and just keep on adding performance to the car."
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff concurred: "Considering where we started today, and more importantly where we had put the cars in terms of their set-up after the Sprint, P6 and P9 was the best prediction from our pre-race simulations.
"The car that we have under us is not currently fast enough. We didn't have the car in the right window. However, we must make sure that we are not trying to find a silver bullet each weekend when it comes to how we run the car.
"We need to focus on getting the basics right, and maximising the package we have," he summarised. "We have developments to bring in the coming races which we hope are a step forward and will improve the car."
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