Lewis Hamilton says he can “only beat the drum so much” to his Mercedes team about fixing the problems with their car for next season.
Hamilton qualified seventh for the Japanese Grand Prix, a second slower than Max Verstappen’s pole lap.
Hamilton said: “I know what the problem is; it’s just getting the guys to make the changes. I try to argue my point but it is not my job to design the car.
“I am hopeful they do the job but it is going to take real changes real quick.”
The seven-time champion said that he was going to see the designers in the Mercedes wind tunnel when he visits the factory next week to “see if they are making those changes”.
Hamilton’s performance in Suzuka underlined the weaknesses of this year’s car.
Hamilton has been vocal with his verdict that Mercedes pursued the wrong design direction with their car this year, which is the same as the one they chose last year and very different from that of dominant Red Bull.
He has consistently complained of a lack of rear grip, and an unpredictable balance, and has said that the relatively forward seating position makes it more difficult for him to feel the car.
As early as the first race, he expressed his frustration that Mercedes had not abandoned their 2022 car philosophy and followed the route pioneered by Red Bull.
“It didn’t feel that shocking today,” Hamilton said on Saturday. “It was just unfortunately slow. I just have a huge lack of rear downforce so you are fighting the rear on a knife edge, you are right on the limit, and that means your [tyre] temperatures are going up and you’re losing grip through thermal deg [degradation] through the lap.
“An easy one second ahead of us for him [Verstappen]. I’ve had cars like that before and I know what it feels like and it’s pretty special when you drive a lap with a car with that sort of balance around here. So I am pushing and hoping for my team to build me that for next year.”
Big changes are coming
Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin – standing in at the team’s news conference at Suzuka for team principal Toto Wolff as the Austrian is missing this race – said Mercedes were planning major changes to the car for next season.
Shovlin said: “We have set ourselves very ambitious targets. We are changing the car quite considerably for next year. Whether or not we can solve all the issues that we’ve got on the handling, that will depend on a number of projects delivering.
“Those projects are under way. They are not complete. But we have got some good directions to try to improve that. The car will be different. We have made a lot of changes to it, but it is very early in the development of a new car to say we’ve got it sorted.
“Lewis and George [Russell] together are always giving us feedback on where the weaknesses are, and while they might be identifying different causes we know fundamentally their car doesn’t have enough stability.
“We know they don’t have the confidence to throw it into a high-speed corner here and know that the rear’s not going to slide more than they want and be a bit of a challenge.
“So you can build a clear picture of where you need to develop and we are certainly not clinging on to any concepts we had before.
“We are very open-minded and we have had a very chastening couple of years, and we are a team working very hard to try to get back to the front.”
‘Go suck on a egg’
Verstappen beat McLaren’s Oscar Piastri to pole by more than half a second and said he has been targeting “a really strong weekend” after his record-breaking run of victories came to an end in Singapore last Sunday with a bad weekend for Red Bull.
Red Bull are set to wrap up the constructors’ championship on Sunday – to do so, they need to outscore Mercedes by one point and not be outscored by Ferrari by 24.
The target looks achievable with Verstappen on pole and team-mate Sergio Perez fifth, both ahead of the Mercedes cars, and with the Mexican splitting the Ferraris of Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz.
Red Bull arrived in Japan amid speculation in F1 as to whether their unexpectedly poor performance in Singapore was influenced by a new technical directive introduced before the race at Marina Bay targeting the use of flexible floors and bodywork.
Verstappen was dismissive of such claims after qualifying.
“We had a bad weekend,” he said. “Of course people then start talking about: ‘It’s all because of the technical directives.’ They can go suck on an egg.
“From my side I was just very fired up to have a good weekend here and make sure we were strong.
“The whole weekend has been really good. As soon as we put the car on the track, it’s been very enjoyable to drive, very predictable, which I think is the most important.
“These high-speed corners, if the car is very well balanced and you can really push it to the limit, it’s just really enjoyable to do to drive.”
Can McLaren challenge Verstappen?
McLaren posed the closest thing to a challenge to Verstappen in qualifying, but Lando Norris and Australian Oscar Piastri – highly impressive in beating his team-mate on his first visit to Suzuka in his maiden F1 season – were more than half a second adrift.
They were asked after qualifying if they had any hope of challenging Verstappen in the race.
Norris joked: “If you want to emulate [Ayrton] Senna into Turn One, Oscar, you can do that happily.”
It was a reference to the famous 1990 race, when Senna – to many minds – deliberately crashed his McLaren into Alain Prost’s Ferrari to settle the result of their championship fight, after the Brazilian had been upset by the refusal of then motorsport boss Jean-Marie Balestre to move pole on to the racing line.
Norris added: “We are going to try but if he’s leading by Turn Two, there’s not a lot you can really do.”
In reality, Verstappen has been so superior this weekend that he will surely find a way by even if he is beaten into the first corner, as he was by Norris at the British Grand Prix and Piastri in the sprint race in Belgium.
The fight will likely be behind him, with Perez trying to move forward, and Mercedes looking to use what is normally better tyre wear to try to threaten Ferrari and McLaren in front of them.
Tyre wear has been high and at least two stops are expected for most drivers.
Piastri said: “Just looking at the tyre choices from everybody, clearly I would say most people are expecting more than one pit stop.
“And whenever you’ve got more deg, more pit stops, it just increases the margin for error. It tests how well you can manage the tyres as well, so it’s not as simple as just going flat out or as quick as the car will let you.”
Norris said: “Mercedes are always very strong on a Sunday. We’re hoping for probably an easy race but it’s never going to be an easy race around here so, like Oscar said, just with undercut powers and things like that, I’m sure there’s going be a lot going on.”