Lewis Hamilton believes he would have claimed a place on the front row of the grid for the British Grand Prix if he hadn’t made a mistake at the final corner.
The Ferrari driver produced his strongest qualifying performance of the year so far and looked to be in the hunt for pole position after leading Q2. However he made a mistake at the end of his final flying lap in Q3, after setting the fastest time in the first sector.
“I’m pleased with the progress, I’m really pleased with my direction,” Hamilton told media including RaceFans after qualifying. “My engineer and I have been really gelling a lot better in terms of how we set the car up. I was much happier in the car.
“The lap was really, really nice up until the last corner, just a bit of understeer. I don’t know if it was the kerb that made me [go] wide, but then I just lost it. I think it’s just over a tenth [of a second], so that would definitely have put me on the front row.”
Hamilton was exactly a tenth of a second slower than Oscar Piastri, who will start second. He said understeer has been the car’s main weakness at Silverstone.
“We’ve got a bit of low-speed understeer, which is something which is inherent with this car,” said Hamilton. “I think we’re over-driving to get that extra bit of time.
“On actual pure pace, I don’t think the car is as quick as the cars ahead. So we’re probably having to go a little bit too far over which then makes the car super-peaky. So we need a little more performance to come by.”
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“We are making progress,” he added, “there’s still more to make, but we obviously had the upgrade in the last race. We are improving our process, the way we go about our weekends.
“I definitely feel like we’re punching out better results, so just got to keep pushing.”
Hamilton out-qualified Charles Leclerc for only the fourth time this year. He has moved closer to his team mate’s set-up approach in recent races but said the pair have differed in a key area for this weekend’s race.
“We’re not far apart,” said Hamilton. “Our set-ups are different, but [I’m] more using that method, so it’s more in that direction.
“But he is on a different set-up. He’s got something quite a bit different to me, which I didn’t want to go to. But I was happy with my car.”
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