Former F1 driver and 2016 World Champion
Nico Rosberg called out his former teammate
Lewis Hamilton for making the same excuse in the first five race weekends of the 2024 season.
It is safe to say the seven-time World Champion didn't have the best start to the 2024 season. After the first five race weekends, he stands 9th in the Drivers' Championship.
On the one hand, he doesn't currently have a car to compete with the top three teams. On the other hand, his teammate
George Russell has constantly outperformed him so far.
The 39-year-old showed outstanding performance during the 2024
Chinese Grand Prix sprint race weekend,
where he qualified in P2 and then
went on to cross the finish line in second place.
However, this season has otherwise been terrible for the
Mercedes driver, as he himself admitted in one of his post-race interviews. The problem is that when he is beaten by his teammate, the blame can't be thrown purely on the car.
Throughout multiple race weekends, we have heard time and time again that the seven-time World Champion was experimenting with the setup that supposedly heart his performance.
Hamilton even explained that experimenting with different setups is his way of helping the team collect more valuable data and find the car's sweet spot.
Still, Nico Rosberg thinks the sample size of five race weekends is starting to be too big for Hamilton to have a worse setup in every single one of them. He told Sky Sport Deutschland:
"Lewis is trailing Russell 1-4 in this year's qualifying head-to-head (including sprint qualifying), and each time he [Hamilton] attributes it to the setup. To me, that sounds like an excuse. It's a glaring error for a seven-time world champion."
As it stands after the fifth race weekend of the season,
it is 5-0 in Grand Prix results and 3-1 in qualifying results for the younger Mercedes driver.
Hamilton showed that he still has what it takes in the Sprint Shootout and the Sprint race in China and also suggested that after the weekend, he stop with setup experiments. Will he be able to beat his teammate during the upcoming
Miami Grand Prix sprint race weekend?