Mercedes explain Lewis Hamilton’s struggles with current generation of F1 car ‘not suiting his style’

Mercedes say Lewis Hamilton has struggled over a single lap in the current generation of F1 cars because they are “not suiting his style”, reports Lewis Larkam in Budapest. 

Seven-time world champion Hamilton trails Mercedes teammate George Russell 10-2 in the qualifying head-to-heads this year. Despite holding the record for the most pole positions in F1 with 104, Hamilton has only topped qualifying on one occasion since the introduction of new cars in 2022.

In Monaco, Hamilton bizarrely suggested he would not be quicker than Russell at any point in qualifying this season, prompting wild conspiracy theories which were quickly dismissed by Mercedes.

Ahead of the Hungarian Grand Prix, Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin provided an insight into Hamilton’s qualifying struggles compared to Russell.

“George has always set a very high bar in qualifying. And as soon as he was in F1, he was impressing. Even in the Williams, he was doing some pretty impressive qualifying sessions. So we know that he's very quick,” Shovlin said on Friday.

"Lewis hasn't disguised the fact that Saturdays were his tough day. He's struggled with this whole generation of car, really, not suiting his style. He's been working on how he drives.”

Asked to explain the reasons for Hamilton’s struggles further, Shovlin said: “It's particularly he’s struggled on the single lap. So his long run pace is always there. And that's been really useful.

“It's more just the way that he wants to attack a corner. When you do that, then the car would snap to oversteer. You start to build tyre temperature.

“So most of our work has been trying to give him a car that you can drive the very attacking style, extract the lap time out of it without it just sort of breaking away on the way in and catching him by surprise.”

Shovlin added: "We had a huge amount of work trying to get the car to: a) be quicker – it just hasn't been quick enough – but also with a handling balance that the drivers can actually attack the lap on Saturday. So we've made progress.

“Recently, George has outqualified Lewis by some fairly fine margins. So it's great for the team that Lewis is back up there and he'll be pushing on. But yeah, we'll keep working on that. And I'm sure that we'll see hopefully some more Lewis pole positions as well.”