Lewis Hamilton said Ferrari’s underwhelming performance at the Austrian Grand Prix represented a reality check for him and the team after the euphoria of his first win with the Scuderia at the last round in Spain.
Hamilton finished in fifth at the Red Bull Ring, after a race where Mercedes’s George Russell took victory from pole position ahead an enormously quick Max Verstappen, whose Red Bull had made great strides with upgrades the team brought to Austria. Hamilton had moved to second in the championship after the last round and was looking so competitive that he was being touted as a potential title contender, but he has dropped back to third, behind Russell and his teammate Kimi Antonelli, the championship leader.
Speaking after his car had suffered from a lack of pace, high tyre degradation and overheating as the team adopted a three-stop strategy that did not pay off, he conceded there was still much they had to learn about how to maximise performance.
“It’s more of a reality check,” he said. “We don’t know why we were so competitive on Sunday in Barcelona. That’s a very strong track for me, I chose a strategy that from experience I knew would work, with the deg[radation] that we had, it was like 2021.
“Then today we were hit more with reality, which is we do still have a good car but we are down compared to Mercedes just on pace. They just are quicker and we have to keep developing.
“It doesn’t mean we can’t close that gap [but] that one win doesn’t mean we are going to be beating them all the time, it’s the opposite, we’ve got a lot of work to do. We still have to just continue to add performance to the car, particularly power is where we’re going to keep working.”
Hamilton, who started third on the grid, did enjoy a spirited fight with Verstappen in the early stages, which the Dutchman at one point suggested should have earned his rival a penalty, when the British driver squeezed him wide at turn six. The stewards judged the racing had been fair.
“It was great, it was a good run, good fun,” Hamilton said of their duel. “He went off the outside. You don’t expect to go around the outside of a champion. I wouldn’t expect to go around the outside of him there and hold the line. He was behind at the apex and therefore he should have backed out but he didn’t.”
The Ferrari team principal, Fred Vasseur, said the team had much to learn from a chastening run in Austria, where Charles Leclerc could manage only eighth after starting second on the grid. “We didn’t have the pace to fight with the Mercedes and Max and we overpushed the first couple of laps,” he said. “We had to change the strategy and everything went in the wrong direction but it’s a good lesson.”
