Domino effect led to Hamilton’s ‘terrible’ Q2 exit

Lewis Hamilton said his qualifying spiraled downhill after an early run-in with Sergio Perez until he was eliminated in Q2 at the Dutch Grand Prix. Mercedes looked competitive on Friday but a wet final practice session saw very little running due to a heavy crash for Logan Sargeant that led to a long red flag. In Q1, Hamilton was then cited for potentially impeding Perez in the middle sector, and says his qualifying unravelled from there. “It just went downhill like a domino effect from the moment with Checo,” Hamilton said. “Then the balance just got more and more snappy, more and more oversteery. It was terrible. “I think we made changes overnight and we couldn’t see in P3, but it’s the same for everybody. We changed the car quite a lot and it was a nightmare today. “The car was massively snappy today. Yesterday was a lot of understeer and then we tried to dial that out and went more the other way.” Hamilton starts from 12th after ending Q2 nearly half a second adrift of the fastest time, and with Carlos Sainz starting one place ahead of him on a track that is relatively tough to overtake on, he believes points will be a challenge. “ that it will be a struggle to get into the top 10,” he admitted. “It’s definitely very, very frustrating, naturally, but this is what it is. That’s kind of hard. It’s kind of the weekend and we have to move on to next week.” With George Russell qualifying fourth but nearly 0.6s off pole position, trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin says Mercedes underperformed as a team on Saturday. “Our performance today was disappointing, and we had certainly hoped for more,” Shovlin said. “Both drivers looked more competitive at times in the session than the results showed. Lewis was strong in Q1 and George in Q2, but we failed to get it together when it mattered. The car hasn’t felt as good for either driver today. We were suffering from understeer yesterday but today we were struggling for rear grip. “Our attention now turns to tomorrow’s race. Our long-run pace was reasonable yesterday and hopefully that will remain. If it does, we will be looking to move forwards with both drivers. The McLarens looked very strong on Friday so we may be looking at keeping George in the fight for the lower reaches of the podium, rather than victory. With Lewis, we will aim to recover well and score as many points as we can.”