'Devastated' Hamilton perplexed by Monaco woes

Lewis Hamilton admits he was "devastated" when getting knocked out in Q2 during qualifying for the Monaco Grand Prix, to the extent he couldn't get out of his car immediately.

Having been fastest in FP1 on Thursday, Hamilton suffered in FP2 as Mercedes took the wrong setup direction. While Valtteri Bottas was more competitive in final practice, Hamilton was still struggling and after a difficult Q2 session his final attempt to progress was ended by Stoffel Vandoorne's crash at the exit of the Swimming Pool section.

"I get over things pretty quickly," Hamilton, who will start from 13th place, said. "I was devastated after the session, to the point that I couldn't get out of the car. So much energy and work goes into these weeks, collectively as a team and individually, the way you prepare yourself. And when you see the other car is capable of making it work and you can't think of why you aren't able to and it feels it's like a mystery, because none of us can really understand it.

"So, yes, it's difficult. When you don't get into Q3 your weekend is pretty much done and it's really about trying to recover as much as you can. I hope that Valtteri can win the race tomorrow, that somehow he can get ahead of the Ferraris – that would be great for the team, because we want to beat them in the Constructors' (championship). And it's also disappointing for me, because it's not going to be so easy for me to back him up and score those points for the team.

"I feel that for the team – everyone is working so hard back at the factory, they rely on me to get it together and today, somehow, I wasn't able to. But we stand together – we win and we lose as a team. Tomorrow I'll try everything I can to get up as high as possible. It's very hard to overtake, we'll probably have to take some risks, but, as always, we'll weigh up our risks."

Hamilton says his biggest frustration is the lack of understanding as to why he struggled so much compared to Bottas, with his teammate qualifying just 0.045s off pole position in third place.

"At the moment we don't know what went wrong with the car. We just did the debrief, so at the moment it's a big unknown. A lot of analysis will go into trying to understand it, but it is a tire issue. I didn't get the grip from the tires, and it kind of changed from FP1 – I never got them working like in FP1. We have to get to the bottom of it, but we had a similar scenario in Sochi, particularly on my side, so I hope we can discover the issue and move forward.

"It's a very, very strange thing because I did the same thing as I do always when I leave the garage, the same thing I did in FP1, but it's just a case of the tires going in and out, in and out, in and out (of the temperature window). Mostly they're under the temperature, and it's not just the fronts or the rears – it could be just one tire, and another tire... So, in general all tires were not in the window."