Lewis Hamilton admits: “The car was good in the Sprint, then we made it worse with setup changes”. Lewis Hamilton finished only sixth in the Chinese GP.

The Shanghai weekend was, to say the least, two-sided for Lewis Hamilton. It was almost a fairy tale until Saturday morning, as the seven-time world champion secured his first pole position as a Ferrari driver and then also won the Sprint. However, when the Chinese Grand Prix got into full swing, with the actual qualifying and the main race, things took a definite turn for the worse.

The Ferrari driver could not do better than the fifth fastest time in qualifying and ended up finishing sixth in the race, also paying the price for a strategic gamble that did not pay off: among the front-running drivers, he was the only one to opt for a two-stop strategy. However, the feeling is that even with a single stop, he would not have been able to hold off Max Verstappen, who in the final stages also overtook the twin SF-25 of Charles Leclerc.

According to Lewis Hamilton, the biggest issue was performance: “We gave it a try, and I’m glad we attempted something different. However, I struggled with performance. Basically, I had a good car in the Sprint, and we made some changes to try to improve, but we got worse in qualifying, and it was even worse in the race.”

“It was very difficult to keep up with those ahead of us, so we have a lot to learn. Also, the pit stop here is too long; there are too many seconds to recover. Even though I was very fast at the end, Max Verstappen was putting in similar lap times even though I had much fresher tires, which is a shame,” he added to Sky Sport F1.

When asked if the issue was related to the ride height of the car, Lewis Hamilton explained that this was not the change that slowed down his Ferrari, but rather a setup direction that he believes was completely wrong.

“Who said we changed the ride height? We made other changes. Of course, we adjusted that too, but it wasn’t a huge factor. However, putting everything together, the situation got significantly worse. Charles had tested some things in Bahrain that I hadn’t tried, but we both followed that path, and it wasn’t the right one, so we must not repeat it,” the British driver concluded at the end of the Chinese Grand Prix.