Saudi Arabian Grand Prix | ‘Not connected’ to his Mercedes, Hamilton admits Russell is doing a better job than him

Preceded in the championship last year by George Russell, author of the only pole position and the only victory for Mercedes, Lewis Hamilton had lost his status as leader among the Grays. At the start of the 2023 season, two weeks ago in Sakhir, the seven-time world champion lost to his young teammate in qualifying but he regained control in the race.

On Saturday, LH44 was no match for the timed lap. Transparent eighth at 0″958 from pole, the seven-time world champion especially gave up 0″366 to his neighbor in the garage, located four rows above him. Faced with the evidence, he took his part in his personal failure, well beyond the lack of competitiveness of his W14.

Different W14s

“I had a little trouble today, but we just gotta keep tryinghe confessed. No matter what changes we made, we struggled to extract performance from the car, and I don’t feel fully connected to it at the moment. It’s something we’ll be working on to improve confidence in future races. George did a great job and he wasn’t that far behind some of the leading cars.”

Noting that the presence of the Mercedes n ° 63 in the second row, the 38-year-old champion concluded that the car is “obviously powerful”, in an interview with motrosport.com, adding feeling “a little lost” with his single-seater of 2023. On this circuit faster than Sakhir, he explained to suffer from a single-seater “a little unstable at high speed” because of the settings adopted, which are a bit different from the sister machine.

Russell celebrates

Without going into details, Toto Wolff lifted a corner of the veil on the difficulties of Lewis Hamilton. “Lewis’ lap seemed stuck in sector 1 so we have to look into that, commented the team principal. The time never fell for him, but he was as fast or faster than George for the rest of the lap, and we have to assess the effect of the set-up differences.And Andrew Shovlin, Track Engineering Director, completed his boss’ briefing by talking about a balance and grip issue for the #44 W14 in Sector 1.

For his part, George Russell did not pretend to be modest, which says a lot about the place he is gradually taking with the Greys. “We exceeded the car’s potential and our own expectations to be ahead of an Aston Martin and a Ferrariwelcomed the ex-pilot Williams. We know we’re not in the fight for pole yet, but we have to maximize what we have, and that’s what we definitely did today..” But again, only the race will tell who was closer to the truth.