Lewis Hamilton is working on a "masterplan" to win the Chinese Grand Prix after ending up with a Ferrari that was “really, really hard to drive” in qualifying just hours after dominating the sprint race.
Hamilton and team-mate Charles Leclerc will share the third row for Sunday’s race, behind the McLaren, the Mercedes of George Russell that split them and Max Verstappen’s Red Bull.
While Hamilton’s final Q3 lap wasn’t the cleanest - he admitted he “probably could have been a couple of tenths further up” - the Ferraris were never a realistic threat to the McLarens.
Part of that - as Mark Hughes detailed in his Saturday analysis - is because the McLarens gave a more realistic account of their true pace, Russell unlocked a better way for the W16 to work its front tyres and Verstappen found a marginal improvement (0.050s) versus Friday while Hamilton lost 0.078s with his scruffier lap.
But it’s also because of tweaks Hamilton and Ferrari made between the sprint race and grand prix qualifying.
“We made a couple of changes to the car after sprint qualifying, to rectify some problems we had,” Hamilton explained.
“And I don't know if it's the wind but the car became quite snappy.”
The increased wind won’t have helped given Ferrari geared Hamilton’s set-up more towards greater frontend to help protect the front tyres from graining, with the compromise of some added rear instability.
A ‘masterplan‘ to win
Theoretically those set-up changes will give Hamilton greater performance on Sunday, making his Ferrari kinder on its front tyres in a race that’s likely to be defined by tyre management.
Hamilton managed things superbly in the sprint race but that was partly because he was running in clean air at the front of the field for the entirety of the 19-lap race.
He’s highly unlikely to get that same luxury in the grand prix although there are at least some overtaking opportunities.
“It's not a circuit where you only have one line everywhere. That's the positive,” Hamilton said.
“But you can see people are still struggling to follow one another. So how you use the tyres, when you use the tyres, is going to be key.
“I'm in a much different position as well. But I feel optimistic. I'd like to get a good start and jump at least one car, and then slowly…tonight I'm just going to make a masterplan of how to win.
“Then I've got to try and execute it. But that's what my mindset is at.”
Every team and driver will be second-guessing the changes they made before qualifying and whether they'll be of benefit in the race.
Even polesitter Piastri was left wondering if he'd gone too far.
"We changed a few things. I wasn't perfectly happy with the car I had in sprint quali and the sprint, so I was trying to make it a bit better for today - and honestly probably more for tomorrow," he said.
"I’m not sure yet whether it was necessarily better or worse. I think it was maybe a small step better. I think the pace both days has been similar. It’s just been quite tricky to get laptimes out of it.
"Through Q1 and Q2 I was genuinely struggling and somehow found a lot of time in Q3 that I still don’t fully understand myself yet.
"Even when you change things, you can’t turn the car upside down. It's kind of got its characteristics that you have to live with, especially on a sprint weekend.
"The car was quick yesterday, it was quick this morning, you're not going to risk everything by trying to be half a second faster than everyone.
"So I think just some small things that were in the direction I wanted before the session and I’m not sure I want that now. But it did what I expected, at least."
In such a tight fight at the front and with further swings expected from track to track and even session to session as qualifying and the sprint showed, Hamilton is braced for plenty more of this in 2025.
“It's going to be swings and roundabouts, right? It's going to be ups and downs. And again, this afternoon, we didn't expect to be P5 and P6 - or at least I didn't expect to be where I am. But it's what we're going to be faced with through the season,” Hamilton said.
“I just got to just try and stay calm and just give it everything and see where we turn up.”
Leclerc: We’re just not fast enough
Leclerc has been a step behind Hamilton all weekend long but got to within a tenth of him by the end of Q3.
“There wasn't anything more. It's a bit frustrating because obviously yesterday I wasn't really on it and there was the potential at that moment for pole,” Leclerc said.
“I felt like today I was more on it considering it's a track where I have always struggled, I felt like I did the best out of what was capable from my side.
“We are just not fast enough. I felt after Australia that if we had put every bit together in qualy we would be three tenths off - I feel like today we put every bit together and we are three tenths off, and I'll say this is the gap that there is between the McLaren and ourselves at the moment.”
The changes made on Leclerc’s side of the garage after the sprint race - where he finished fifth while Hamilton won - made him “a bit more comfortable with the car” and made it “easier to put everything together”.
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but he cautioned against taking Hamilton’s strong sprint race pace as a reason to be optimistic for the grand prix.
“This I will be careful with. I feel like obviously dirty air and free air makes a huge difference with these cars,” Leclerc said.
“Lewis is incredible in the race, and obviously I always look at his data in order to learn something out of it, but in conditions like these it's a bit more difficult.
“It's difficult to understand where I stand in a stint so different.”
On being second-best to Hamilton this weekend Leclerc said: “On my side it motivates me to do better and to take those opportunities myself but he did a better job so fair play, nothing to say.”
Leclerc is still hopeful Ferrari might surprise itself with its race pace in such a tyre-critical grand prix.
“That's a positive sign, because obviously especially with the longer stints and a longer race, then we can hopefully use our advantage with the tyre degradation,” Leclerc said when The Race asked about Ferrari’s strength at the end of stints.
“But with the dirty air as I experienced this morning it's very, very, very difficult to make a pass on track.
“It's going to be a bit difficult to recover on track. But with strategy if we manage to put ourselves in the right place at the right time, not having too much dirty air, I feel like we might surprise ourselves.”
