Hamilton Explains Issues That Held Him Back From Achieving Better Result In Bahrain

Saturday, 02 March 2024 at 22:00

The seven-time World Champion talked over the problems that hampered his progress throughout the Saturday race at the Bahrain International Circuit.

Mercedes F1 driver Lewis Hamilton qualified in P9 during the qualification on Friday. However, he suggested his car was set up more towards the race on Saturday, so there were some expectations from the 39-year-old.

In the end, he did manage to move up a few positions up the grid but finished only in P7. The Mercedes driver revealed he encountered multiple issues throughout the race, making everything difficult. He named all the problems for the media:

"For a while, my battery was dead, so down the straights, I was just derating, so I lost a lot of ground on the McLarens."

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A battery plays an important role in the power output of F1 cars. The British driver was able to fix it after a while, but this problem alone lost him a couple of seconds.

"I was fixing that for some laps - that took a good 10 laps and then after that I was just really trying to get back on it and catch up once we got that fixed."

Then, the seven-time World Champion revealed he also struggled with overheating brakes (something that Charles Leclerc encountered as well), and to top everything, his seat broke during the race.

"Then there was a bit of overheating with the brakes, but generally the performance was so-so My seat starting moving, my left side dropped and so it was moving through the braking zones."

In the end, Hamilton managed to overtake Piastri and almost caught up with Lando Norris but finished two seconds behind the 24-year-old. He added:

"But what I feel is that the last couple of years, we have had all these problems, and we have spent several races trying to undo all those problems, trying to figure out what those problems were as opposed to now, we have a platform that we can start adding bricks to. So now it is a building process from here, and I think we're a great team."