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Lewis Hamilton says he and Mercedes expected to trail Red Bull by “double the gap” that they ended up seeing in the first qualifying of the Formula 1 season in Bahrain.
The hybrid era’s dominant outfit, Mercedes appeared to be on the back foot coming out of three days of testing in Bahrain, but believed it had made improvements before the opening grand prix weekend.
He's been unstoppable so far on our opening race weekend of 2021 👏
And @Max33Verstappen was too quick for the rest in Saturday's race for pole 🚀#BahrainGP 🇧🇭 #F1 pic.twitter.com/846mv6KBDQ
— Formula 1 (@F1) March 27, 2021
Then Red Bull’s Max Verstappen topped all three Sakhir practice sessions, and though Hamilton looked firmly in pole contention after the opening runs of Q3, Verstappen pulled out a much-improved second lap to take pole by four tenths.
“Sorry, guys, I gave it everything,” Hamilton told the team upon learning that Verstappen had beaten him to pole. He subsequently elaborated that the lap was “the best I could do, that’s for sure, I got absolutely everything I could from the car”.
Despite this, Hamilton praised the work his team had done since testing, as he claimed Mercedes ended up “definitely closer than we expected”.
“I think this is a really good step forward for us. Coming into this weekend we thought it was double the gap that you see today.”
Asked by The Race why he seemed in such a good spirit despite what was in the end a rare resounding qualifying defeat, Hamilton said: “Of course we want to be first, but we knew that it was going to be a challenge.
“We knew from day one on track really the Red Bull was faster than us, and we know we had a bit of an uphill slope to climb.”
Hamilton said “there has been no development” on the W12 since testing, in that the team didn’t seek to bolt on new parts but rather aimed to get more out of the current package and understand it better.
“It’s different to last year’s with these changes. We’re down in certain places, it’s gonna take some time to catch up, but it might be specific here for here and maybe not elsewhere.”
Team-mate Valtteri Bottas has looked adrift to Hamilton all throughout the weekend, but gathered himself to qualify third, six tenths down on Verstappen.
Explaining his “not optimal” qualifying, Bottas pointed to an extra insurance run in Q1 as being something that compromised him in Q3, leaving him with just one run on a fresh set of softs.
“Throughout the qualifying, the pace, my confidence within the car and the feeling with the car and understanding of the wind was improving,” he said. “So it was getting better and better, but I think Max was out of reach today definitely.
“Still, even with one new set at the end of quali it felt like a nice lap and decent comeback from a trickier session earlier on [Bottas was just fourth. 1,3s off the pace in FP3].
“And at least now we have two cars in the top three, so I’m sure we can do something good with it.”
