Hamilton rues impact of poor qualifying in Zandvoort as Russell mystified by Mercedes’ lack of pace

Lewis Hamilton was left questioning what could have been after a recovery drive to P8 in the Dutch Grand Prix, with the seven-time world champion suggesting that a top five result would have been possible had he had a better qualifying, while George Russell admitted his surprise at Mercedes’ drop-off in pace.

It was a tough Saturday for Hamilton in Zandvoort, the Briton having exited qualifying in Q2 before then receiving a three-place grid penalty for impeding Sergio Perez in Q1. This dropped him down to a starting position of P15, which subsequently became P14 following Alex Albon’s disqualification.

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From there Hamilton managed to work his way through the field and he eventually crossed the line in eighth place.

Asked afterwards if he was pleased with what he had managed to recover, the Mercedes driver responded: “Yeah, I mean it felt like I did a lot but I didn’t really get that far, you know?

“I felt I did more than my result shows, but yeah, unfortunately qualifying really, really made it difficult. I think if I’d qualified where I should have qualified, I’d have been in the top five.”

Pushed further on whether the visit to Zandvoort had been an off weekend for the Silver Arrows – given their strong run across recent races – Hamilton explained: “[It was] partly me, partly the car.

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“The car really didn’t feel as strong as the last race – we need to look into that. Whether our upgrade is delivering or not, we have to wait and see.”

Russell ended the race one position ahead of his team mate in seventh, leaving the British driver disappointed after starting from P4.

“[I’m] just surprised by the lack of pace, really don’t know where that disappeared to,” he reflected later on. “Friday was good, Saturday was reasonable and looked on course for sort of a comfortable fourth or third prior to the race, and suddenly [we] just went backwards and I don’t really know what happened.”

Quizzed on how much the result had hurt following on from Mercedes’ positive momentum of late, Russell responded: “Yeah, it really does. First off weekend for us since the upgrades, but I’m not too concerned – if you take the last seven races, we’ve been really strong in six of them.

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“We’ve been ahead of Ferrari in all of them and suddenly today they looked really competitive. We need to understand what happened as until today we looked on course for a pretty half-decent weekend. As I said, it all went away from us and I don’t know what happened.”