Hamilton rues Ferrari step back after Friday showing

Lewis Hamilton believes Ferrari took a step back on Saturday at the Monaco Grand Prix, despite qualifying in third place.

Ferrari topped both practice sessions on Friday, with Hamilton fastest in FP2 ahead of teammate Charles Leclerc, reversing the order from FP1. The final session on Saturday morning was not as smooth, and then the pair could only qualify on the second row of the grid as Kimi Antonelli beat Max Verstappen to pole position.

“We were looking really strong throughout the weekend and it’s always so much fun driving around this track,” Hamilton said. “I felt great in the car and I think we made progress yesterday. Then coming into today, we took a bit of a step back, lost some performance overnight, and then going into qualifying, the car was really in a bad place.

“You could see in Q1, I was like seven tenths down or something like that and had to make huge adjustments to the wing in order to try and rebalance the car for some reason. So, I’m not quite sure exactly what went wrong. We’ll deep-dive into it.

“But I think ultimately we lost the chance to fight for the front row going into qualifying with the balance that we ended up with. It was a bit of a surprise, but I’m still grateful. I got everything I could out of it at the end with the balance that I had. The car was on the edge, I was on the edge, as much as I could be.”

Hamilton says Ferrari changed very little on its car after Friday but still found it behaved differently in qualifying, though he hopes for a chance to make up positions off the line on Sunday.

“I don’t think we went the wrong way with setup, that’s the thing. It’s the tiniest tweaks, like a millimeter here, a millimeter there," he said. "But we really need to look into what switched because the car was completely different to what it was before and I didn’t have any rear end for some reason, which I’d had, good balance most of the weekend.

“I do think with the pace that we had yesterday, I think we could have been closer. These guys (Antonelli and Verstappen) really started putting out some amazing times at the end, so fair play to them. We’ll push hard tomorrow. Hopefully we can keep up and who knows, maybe we could have a really good start.”