Hamilton says one wing adjustment ‘tipped it over the edge’ in Singapore qualifying
Lewis Hamilton says a single wing adjustment pushed his Ferrari beyond its limit in Q3 at the Singapore Grand Prix and cost him a shot at pole position.
Hamilton qualified third, 0.123 seconds behind Max Verstappen’s pole-winning 1:31.373s and 0.069s adrift of team-mate Charles Leclerc. Ferrari made changes to the car going into qualifying, and Hamilton felt the benefit straight away.
“The car was feeling so much better, and I really felt like she had more in her,” he said. “So we were just pushing her more and more through the laps and through the sessions. Q1 and Q2 were awesome.”
Q3 was a different story. Hamilton lost two tenths early in the lap and could not recover it. “We got to Q3 and snaps in Turn 1 and 3 put me two tenths down,” he explained. “The rest of the lap was good, and then the last lap, just again struggled with snapping.”
He traced the problem to the extra wing Ferrari added to unlock more performance after Q2. “The only way in order to try and extract that is to try and add wing,” Hamilton said. “And in doing so, I think it just tipped it over the edge. It was only like one hole or something like that, but it was just on the knife point, and after that then the car was just snappy.”
The experience left him with a clear view of how narrow the car’s working window is. “There’s a real fine line with our car where it’s over the edge or under the limit, and finding that sweet spot is very, very difficult,” he said. He also questioned his own reaction to the improving track. “You have to kind of react to that. In hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t have.”
Hamilton still left Marina Bay satisfied with the result given how his final laps went. “I’m grateful to be third, to be honest, given that those laps weren’t very good,” he said.
He was full of praise for Red Bull, whose pace he put down to both the engine and the car. “I think they brought an upgrade in Baku which has really put them at the front,” Hamilton said. Isack Hadjar, Verstappen’s team-mate, did not set a time after more reliability problems.
Hamilton expects Verstappen to be hard to catch in the race, but he sees a role for Ferrari’s two cars. “It’d be very hard for us to beat Max [Verstappen] tomorrow, but there’s two Ferraris there, and I think we can hopefully, you know, there might be opportunities for us to work together to try and apply the pressure.”
He took encouragement from his start in the wet sprint race earlier in the day, though he knows Sunday’s dry conditions will be different. “They’re very, very quick, but I think we have the car in a good place that hopefully we can at least hold on.”
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