22 September 2023 , 10:34
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Max Verstappen has one less rival at the Japanese Grand Prix as Lewis Hamilton "definitely won't be winning" the race.
That's according to the seven-time world champion himself. He made that definitive statement about his chances this weekend as he reacted to two less-than-encouraging practice sessions for his team.
The seven-time world champion was outside the top 10 in both. And George Russell also struggled in the first, before managing to go fifth fastest in the second session on Friday.
Concerned about the balance of his Mercedes car, Hamilton ruled himself out of contention at Suzuka this weekend. He said: "It was a really bad day, to be honest. A real struggle out there. A long way off, two seconds off in the first session and over a second off in the second. We're working away at just trying to fix the car's balance."
Asked if the problem has been identified, Hamilton replied: "It's figuring out what is wrong. We were much closer in the last race [Singapore] but we didn't have many high-speed corners, only one, but not as high-speed as the corners here.
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"Our car has, more often than not, been a bit weaker in the high-speed corners, so if you look at places like at Silverstone, for example – Copse is one of our weaker corners. It's an area that we need to work on and get the car in more of a sweet spot where we're not overheating our tyres as much.
"We'll work on it overnight and turn it around for tomorrow, but we definitely won't be winning this weekend! If I in particular can move further up the order so I can at least back up George, who did a not-such-a-bad lap... yeah, tough one."
Trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin went into more detail about where the car was struggling. "We've certainly been on the back foot today. Both FP1 and FP2 proved tricky sessions for us," he explained. "Both drivers reported struggling with an overall lack of grip and the balance of the car.
"We made some changes ahead of the second session and gained some useful learnings from that. However, we know we must make improvements overnight. We are clearly not strong enough in the faster corners, with the first sector proving a particular weakness for us. That's where the majority of our work will be focused this evening.
"George did find some improvement on the single lap in FP2, but we are facing the same challenges on both our qualifying pace and the long run. In a sense that is encouraging. If we can fix one, the other should improve too. However, we are not underestimating the work we've got to do to be stronger over the rest of the weekend."