Lewis Hamilton said he’s never had the kind of spin which put him out of sprint race qualifying before in his career.
His Ferrari snapped out of control as he approached the final corner on his last attempt to set a time in SQ1. Hamilton spun onto the run-off area and came to a stop without hitting anything.
Asked what went wrong, Hamilton initially only said: “I spun.” He said the rear lock-up was “the first time, I think, in my career” he’s had such a problem.
Hamilton’s first attempt to set a flying lap went awry when he ran wide at Stavelot. The team ran their new rear suspension for the first time this weekend but Hamilton said the car felt “not great” and “there’s not really a lot to say.”
“Obviously I’m massively frustrated,” he told the official Formula 1 channel. “A lot of work has gone in and to be [only] there is not really great, so hopefully tomorrow will be better.”
His team mate Charles Leclerc progressed to the final round of qualifying and will start the sprint race from the second row of the grid alongside Lando Norris’s McLaren. However he was over three-quarters of a second off the pace set by pole-winner Oscar Piastri, which he admitted came as a disappointment given the team’s latest upgrade.
“I felt the changes, but the thing is that today the gap is huge,” said Leclerc. “I’m sure we did a step forward, but for some reason the McLaren seems to be even faster than usual around this track, so it’s a bit disappointing on that side of things.
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“But I think what we were searching for with those upgrades, we had. It’s just a shame to have such a difficult qualifying session, especially in terms of gaps.”
However Leclerc said the car’s balance feels good and believes they have a platform they can develop on.
“The feeling was pretty good, which is a mixed feeling,” he said. “On one side I’m happy that the car feels better. On the other, even if the car feels actually pretty good we are still seven tenths off, which is a huge amount of time. Yes it’s a long track, but still it’s a big amount of time.
“So there’s a lot of work to be done, for sure. We just need to add grip to this car at the end of the day. I don’t think we do anything particularly wrong, but we just need more grip, that we don’t seem to have for now.”
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2025 Belgian Grand Prix
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