Hamilton had a lot of work to do at Zandvoort
Lewis Hamilton says he “had a lot of fun” in the Dutch GP after charging from 14th on the grid to eighth in a race that saw no retirements or safety car periods.
Hamilton had a difficult qualifying, earning only 12th place in Q2 with an oversteering car, and then receiving a three-place grid penalty for impeding Sergio Perez.
He gained one grid place back from the exclusion of Alex Albon, but he had to do the rest of the work himself on Sunday by passing on track.
“I had a lot of fun today,” he said when asked by this writer about his race. “We planned to do a two-stop. We started on the soft, and the soft tyre I think was a very good tyre,
“It felt much better than my medium tyre in practice, and the hard tyre was feeling decent.
“It was really difficult to see kind of what I needed to do, whether to push for it. But I was on a two, so trying to use up the tyre, but also wasn’t sure whether or not we might possibly go for a one.
“I had a bit of a lock-up, which kind of then made me just stay on my normal strategy. Probably if I’d done one stop and managed a little bit better, I probably could have done a one, and maybe finished one spot ahead.”
Hamilton noted that his qualifying troubles resulted from making overnight changes and then not being able to properly evaluate them in FP3, due to a wet track and the red flag caused by Logan Sargeant’s accident.
“We made a big setup change going into P3 but then it was wet, so we didn’t even get to test it,” he said. “Got in the session, and it was very oversteering. And then today, I took out a bunch of wing and balanced it, it was fine.
“If I just qualified like I should have qualified, if I didn’t have the problem through qualifying, then I think I had the pace today to be definitely in the top five. If I’d I started fourth, for example, I would have finished at least fourth.”
His biggest disappointment was losing fastest lap to Lando Norris on the very last lap, having been assured by the team that the time he set earlier on soft tyres would be safe: “It’s insane how quick they were, really impressive. Twenty-two seconds to Max…”
Hamilton now heads to his first Italian GP since he was announced as a Ferrari driver, but he played down the significance.
“I look forward to next weekend because I had a shite weekend this weekend, and I’m looking forward to trying to do better next weekend!,” he said.
“I have no idea how we’ll be next week. Hopefully not worse than this week.”
Adam Cooper F1 