2024 Mercedes F1 car has “spikes” of promise that “disappear”

The seven-time F1 world champion was eradicated in Q2 forward of the Australian Grand Prix, having beforehand scored eight pole positions in Melbourne. He missed out on the highest 10 shootout to team-mate George Russell by 0.05 seconds.

Hamilton speculated the “spike” of promise proven in remaining observe earlier on Saturday had been undone by elevated winds for qualifying that put the W15 challenger on a “knife edge”.

This temperamentality with the automobile put him in thoughts of its two ground-effect predecessors, which proved equally unpredictable.

“Each outing you be taught one thing new,” mentioned Hamilton. “FP3 felt actually good for us, and I felt actually optimistic going into qualifying however then, I do not know if it is the wind selecting up, the wind picked up fairly a bit, identical as yesterday, after which the automobile is simply a lot extra on a knife edge.

“It is three years in a row an analogous feeling,” he added. “However then there’s these spikes of ‘Oh, it may very well be good’ like this morning. After which it form of disappears.

“If we are able to work a approach of discovering that goodness within the automobile and making it extra constant and holding onto that, perhaps we will be extra aggressive. However there’s loads of work we have to do however everybody’s working as laborious as they’ll.”

Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes F1 W15

Picture by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Pictures

Hamilton initially struggled to match Russell within the qualifying head-to-head throughout their first season as team-mates in 2022.

However it will definitely got here to gentle that this was partly owed to Hamilton operating with excessive set-up variations in a bid to troubleshoot the porpoising W13.

With the pair choosing completely different tunes once more in Australia, when requested by Motorsport.com if historical past was repeating itself, Hamilton mentioned that he was certainly trying one thing related.

“In 2022, we weren’t splitting [set-ups],” defined Hamilton. “George was doing one factor. I used to be making an attempt each set-up there was to try to assist the workforce discover choices and work out how we might repair it.

“It is just about the identical, just a little bit much like this yr. I’ve tried a lot of various things. However I feel this weekend we’re a lot nearer.”