Hamilton: 'Ridiculous' tyre pressures make recovery harder

Lewis Hamilton says his ability to recover through the field in tomorrow's Belgian Grand Prix has been made harder by the tyre pressures being "a ridiculous number".

Pirelli has imposed minimum tyre pressures of 23.5 PSI front and 22 PSI rear at Spa-Francorchamps, which combined with hot weather has led to high levels of degradation. Hamilton will start from the back row as a result of numerous power unit penalties, and having also started from last place in China this season the championship leader says he faces a much tougher task in this race.

"It’s completely different to China," Hamilton said. "In China we didn’t have failures the previous year and [Pirelli] didn’t put the pressures up to a ridiculous number.

"That is the case here, they had the failures last year and then there was the failures this year, so they put the pressures up to 23 or 24 PSI or whatever it is, which is so high. I’ve never seen pressures like that in my whole racing career, so that doesn’t help.

"Plus, it’s so hot that with those pressures we will get blisters and in China the tyres went a lot longer and it was cooler, so the tyres behaved more like normal tyres. But here there was not really much you could do to stop the tyres from blistering and overheating, so it’s definitely a much harder race than China ever was."

Hamilton says he hopes to avoid a pit lane start as he feels he can gain more at the start by lining up on the grid, even if the risk of being caught up in an incident is higher.

"I never like to start from the pit lane. It means you have to wait for them to come past the pit lane exit, and by the time I get round the corner they will be halfway down the hill and the last car will almost be going into Eau Rouge, and it means I then have to catch up.

"There is the possibility of me crashing in Turn 1 and you avoid that [with a pit lane start], but there is also the possibility that there’s not and then I just give up eight or seven seconds or whatever it is. I can’t afford to lose any time, so my plan is to start on the grid."

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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.