The first race of Lewis Hamilton’s last season for the Mercedes F1 Team ended with a shockingly underperformed result compared to a positive start on Thursday and Friday.
Albeit the poor performance of Hamilton’s W15 during qualifying, the 7-time world champion managed to gain two positions to end up in the 7th place and 50 seconds behind the race winner, Max Verstappen.
The Mercedes driver was unable to move up the field and was, for most of the race, stuck behind the McLaren drivers and in a battle with Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso, which he won.
Hamilton recalled what happened to his Grand Prix performance following a surprisingly good performance on Thursday, where he finished first during one of the practice sessions.
“For a while my battery was dead, so down the straights I was just derating so I lost a lot of ground on the McLarens.
“I was fixing that for some laps – that took a good 10 laps and then after that I was just really trying to get back on it and catch up once we got that fixed.
Hamilton also had a strange occurrence when he informed his racing engineer that his seat was broken.
“My seat starting moving, my left side dropped and so it was moving through the braking zones.”
In the dying stages of the race, the soon-to-be Ferrari driver managed to fix the issues. In regards to that, Hamilton passed Oscar Piastri and Fernando Alonso whilst closing in on 6th placed Lando Norris and George Russell in 5th.
“I was catching at the end and feeling racey. But the gap was so big, I lost so much at the beginning of the race. I feel good, I don’t feel downbeat. It was a super-average race.”
“But what I feel is that the last couple of years, we have had all these problems and we have spent several races trying to undo all those problems, trying to figure out what those problems were as opposed to now, we have a platform that we can start adding bricks to.”
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