Lewis Hamilton says his “challenging” Miami weekend “won’t define us” after the Ferrari driver struggled for pace.
Hamilton was consistently a few tenths adrift of Ferrari team-mate Charles Leclerc throughout the Sprint weekend in Miami and failed to finish any session in the top five. He was classified sixth in Sunday’s race, ahead of Leclerc, after the Monegasque received a 20-second penalty for cutting several corners on the last lap following contact with the barriers.
“A challenging weekend for us. With the contact I was pretty much stuck in no man’s land and couldn’t extract more from the car,” Hamilton wrote on Instagram. “Tough to take especially given all the hard work the team has put in, but this won’t define us. It’s how we keep going. We’re taking what we can from these past few days and putting everything else behind us. We move forward.”
Hamilton started the season strongly in Australia and China, taking his first Ferrari podium in Shanghai, but has lacked performance compared with Leclerc in the last two races in Japan and Miami. He was four tenths behind Leclerc in Sprint Qualifying and dropped away to seventh in the Sprint.
Set-up changes for qualifying brought Hamilton within two tenths of Leclerc, but he had contact with Alpine’s Franco Colapinto on the opening lap of the Grand Prix and ran a largely lonely race. “Obviously it’s not a good weekend at all. Seventh and seventh [sixth after Leclerc’s penalty]; no-man’s land in both races,” Hamilton told Sky Sports F1. “Particularly with the damage, there was nothing I could do. Really unfortunate because the team worked so hard so to come away with so few points… we have to move on from here.”
He explained the opening-lap incident: “It was just contact. I was unlucky with Max spinning and I had to go to the right of him. I had a good Turn One and I was in a good position and then the only place I could go was right. I lost positions from there and then I think it was Franco that hit me and I lost a lot of performance from there.”
Ferrari effectively brought a new car to Miami with 11 significant upgrades. Hamilton says his result “doesn’t truly reflect the hard work the team has done” and that the team may need to change their preparation for race weekends. “I’m going to have a different approach for the next race,” he added. “The way we’re preparing at the moment is not helping. We’ll see how that goes for the next race.”
Formula 1 next heads to Montreal for the Canadian Grand Prix and another Sprint weekend on May 22-24.