Lewis Hamilton will start the US GP from 19th on the grid after a disastrous Q1 session saw him fail to progress and beat only Sauber driver Zhou Guanyu.
Hamilton’s day was compromised by a broken front suspension element that hampered him in the sprint and left him with severe oversteer.
The team discovered the problem before qualifying and also made set-up changes in an effort to improve the car, but Hamilton struggled with the car and also had traffic issues.
“It’s been pretty terrible,” he said when asked by formu1a.uno about his day. “The car felt great yesterday, so obviously came really optimistic for today. And something failed in the front suspension, literally, as we pulled away from the line for the formation lap.
“And I had that through the race. So they figured that out. They changed the corner, and It just felt like a mess. This shouldn’t happen, and it’s obviously not planned.
“When the suspension is failing and breaking and things aren’t coming together… I mean today, honestly I can’t explain. You have to ask the team what happened with the suspension.
“But I know the guys are working as hard as they can. They did the change.”
Hamilton is downbeat about his prospects for the race, although he hopes he can make progress from 19th.
“There’s not going to be a lot going on. But I mean, I started in karts with a pretty bad go-kart, and I used to come through the field, so see if I can do that tomorrow.”
Regarding the update package Hamilton said: “Any performance we bring is positive. And as I said yesterday all of a sudden we were looking really quick. I don’t know where that went. But we’ll keep pushing.”
Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin confirmed that the suspension issue had been costly.
“We found a broken part on Lewis’ front suspension post sprint, and that definitely impacted the overall balance,” he said.
“In an effort to get the car back to the sweet spot we had on Friday, we made some set-up adjustments ahead of qualifying. Sadly these didn’t have the desired effect.
“A consistent balance continued to elude Lewis, although he was unfortunate to be knocked out in Q1 having been impacted by traffic in sector one.”
