Lewis Hamilton was third and second fastest in the two session at Shanghai today, but he made it clear afterwards that he’s not happy with the McLaren MP4-26.
Hamilton tried the latest floor upgrades today, but struggled to find a balance.
“It’s not been the best of days,” he said. “It wasn’t too bad at the end, but I had a lock-up on my option run, which meant I couldn’t do a long run on it. But set-up wise we’re struggling a little bit with the set-up today, which is the first time since we had the new upgrade on the rear of the car.
“We just need to analyse a little bit and analyse whether the car is actually performing in certain areas of downforce as we expect – I don’t think it is – so that’s really the question for the analysts to understand.
“This morning’s session was difficult. They were changing little bits on the rear floor, and I had a big off moment. That was I think partly to do with one of those things not working. I think there were some positives, and some negatives. The guys are just trying to analyse and understand which way we’re going to go.
“In the afternoon we chose to go with the upgrade which we had. But I’ve been really struggling with the balance of my car. I don’t know if it’s because of the upgrade that we have, or if we’re just in the wrong area of the set-up. At the end I was able to get a reasonably decent lap time, but I wasn’t very comfortable with the car. The long run at the end was not too bad, but generally quite a bit off the Red Bulls.”
Hamilton suggested that the latest update is not yet ready to race.
“My gut feeling is it’s not quite, just yet. We’ve made some adjustments to the upgrade we had last week, which didn’t work then. I think we’ve found some improvements in it, but perhaps it’s not as good as the one we had before just yet. It doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world, I think the car is still great with what we had before. Fingers crossed, either way we’ll be good. I think we’re not in a bad position.”
PS: Apologies for lack of Twitter service this week, so far I have not been able to find a way to beat the Chinese censors. Any suggestions welcome via comments here!
Adam Cooper F1 
What’s there to censor on a F1 tweet surely?
Interesting that after 1 hot lap in FP2 Lewis came on the radio to say his tyres were finished, yet Seb set a lap 2 tenths faster on his 3rd lap of a run. That doesn’t bode too well for Lewis on Sunday. It’ll be interesting to see how Jenson fairs given he seems softer of tyres than his whipper-snapper of a team-mate.
Also the KERS incidents are of interest, McLaren’s overheating and another issue on Webbers KERS (possibily something similar?).
Adam…. I used http://www.lamnia.co.uk/ to obtain a VPN when I was in China in January… It cost about $15.00 for a month..thats the shortest time I could obtain…. Worked for Facebook and YouTube in January , 2011.
I recall Button saying in the post race interview last week that going easy on the tyres isn’t necessarily the best way to make the Pirellis last, he seemed to indicate that backing off would tend to make them worse not better. It sounds like at this point there is a very narrow window of performance with the tyres, and given the variables from circuit to circuit along with atmospheric variations coupled with how the car is set up it might be a bit of a crap shoot to find the optimum tyre strategy and set up.