Lewis Hamilton, who was left to regret his choice to alter setup, called his Chinese Grand Prix the “worst” race of the season.
Hamilton was eliminated in qualifying after being second in the sprint on Saturday due to an error on his last lap. He started from position 18.
After the Sprint, the six-time China champion talked about how he made a set-up decision to separate himself from his sixth-place finisher, teammate George Russell. Russell finished ninth in the race for the third time in a row and fourth in the previous five, including the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in 2023.
In his last season with Mercedes, it remains the worst start of Hamilton’s F1 career. He explained how starting on the soft tyres made him think he had damage.
Hamilton’s downfall
“We expected to be somewhere around there, so it wasn’t better than expected,” Hamilton said to reporters,
I never had such much understeer in my life, so I initially believed that maybe I had tapped someone.
“I was turning at a low speed and just waiting, waiting, waiting for the car to turn. At one point, there was debris all over the place, so I thought maybe I had broken something, but it was just the setup I went with.
“It was the worst race so far, but we had a second obviously in the sprint, and with some better decisions with set-up, I would be around where George was, but we just have to keep working.”