Lewis Hamilton was again off the pace on Friday. (Image: Getty)
A downbeat Lewis Hamilton has seemingly already accepted that Mercedes won’t be competitive in Miami and only finishing 12th in qualifying for Saturday’s Sprint Race. In a session where Red Bull’s Max Verstappen beat Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc to take pole positio, Hamilton was a place behind team-mate George Russell and cut a downbeat figure afterwards.
“The car felt really good in P1 and then qualifying, it didn’t feel terrible, it’s just we’re seven tenths off. That’s just the pace of our car,” Hamilton told reporters. “I think the sprint race is going to be tough. We’re in 12th so don’t expect a huge amount from there to be honest. It’s not an easy circuit to overtake on or to follow.
The seven-time world champion said his goal was to somehow make his way into the top-eight to secure at least a point, but doesn’t envisage things getting better from here. And he implied recent developments on the car hadn’t narrowed the gap in pace between the Silver Arrows and the front-runners.
“No more experiments,” he explained. “We’ve just been trying to make the car work. I feel like we extracted everything from the car, and that’s just our pace. We just have to accept that for the moment, we’re seven tenths off.”
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Max Verstappen again set the pace in Miami. (Image: Getty)
To compound matters, Verstappen was also unhappy over his own display, despite searing to the front of the grid. And his reaction when he learnt his position was one of genuine surprise.
Informed by race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase he was on pole, a shocked Verstappen replied: “LOL. What happened to the others? This was terrible. I mean I will take it!”
It’s a telling indictment to Hamilton and his remaining rivals that the Dutchman can be ‘terrible’ and still finish top of the pile.
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