Hamilton: The gap with the leaders remains the same

For Lewis Hamilton, qualifying in Miami was clearly better than in previous stages, although he believes the gap to the leaders remains about the same overall.

Lewis Hamilton (6th): “This qualifying went much better than the previous three stages and to be honest I am grateful for this result. We keep adding, keep working to increase the speed.

The entire team, all its employees work very hard, even if it is not visible from the outside. But unfortunately I think we don’t always manage to make progress as quickly as we would like. In my opinion, the backlog of the frontrunners is about the same as at the beginning of the year. Therefore, you must continue to work hard, while maintaining maximum composure.

In the end we will get our way. Overall, we don’t feel like we made any significant improvements this weekend, but over the course of today’s qualifying, when I managed to warm up the tires better, it became more comfortable to drive. But I can’t say anything about our race pace.”

George Russell (12th): “To be honest, we’re a little confused. In the qualifying round I was slower than yesterday in the second practice. The behavior of the car today has completely changed, we have problems with the longitudinal build-up and we just couldn’t attack in the corners.

It’s a shame because W13 has potential and we were fast yesterday, but today we lost a lot and I don’t understand why. The car just lacks stability.

We thought we had chosen a pretty conservative setting to make sure we didn’t wave, but it seemed just as strong as it had on the morning of the third practice.

It manifested itself until the 4th and 5th turns so we had to let go of the throttle even before the braking zones, it was impossible to attack there so it is still unclear what is happening. If we can guess with the settings, we’ll be fast, so the car has potential, but now I’m just upset, I’m worried about myself and the team.

Toto Wolff, team leader: “We cannot be satisfied with the results of qualifying. Yesterday we saw that one of our cars was on the second line of the protocol, and this was our real speed. We achieved this result because we guessed right with the settings, but today we went ahead with the experiments and failed.

The car again lacked pace and at the same time still jumps like a kangaroo on the track. The riders don’t like it and you can see that is why we are lagging behind. But we already have a better understanding of what needs to be done to increase the pace, and we’ve also been able to figure it out thanks to analyzing the reasons for today’s slowdown compared to yesterday’s results.

Yesterday afternoon we had a good car, but then we made it worse ourselves and it was influenced by a whole host of factors. Some we already understand, others we don’t. We are still on a trajectory that leaves a lot to be desired.”