Ferrari got a reality check in Austria, Hamilton admits

Lewis Hamilton says Ferrari got “a reality check” with its performance in the Austrian Grand Prix, as he labored to a fifth-place finish.

Expectations around Ferrari’s potential had grown following Hamilton’s first victory in Spain a fortnight ago, as he closed the gap to Kimi Antonelli to 41 points after the Italian retired late on. Ferrari also brought a power unit upgrade to Austria as it sought to further close the performance gap to Mercedes, but after finishing 26 seconds behind race winner George Russell, Hamilton says it shows how much work is still required.

“I think it’s more of a reality check,” Hamilton said. “We don’t know why we were so competitive on Sunday in Barcelona. That’s a very strong track for me. I chose a strategy that from experience I knew would work, with the degradation that we had it was like 2021.

“But then today I think we were hit more with reality, which is we do still have a good car but we are down compared to Mercedes just on outright pace – they just are quicker and we have to keep developing. It doesn’t mean we can’t close that gap [but] that one win doesn’t mean we are going to be beating them all the time.

“I think it’s the opposite – we’ve got a lot of work to do to try. We still have to just continue to add performance to the car, particularly power is where we’re going to keep working, for sure.”

Hamilton was running second and keeping within a second of Russell in the opening stint in Austria before his pace fell away, and he says he was happy with the extra pit stop he took as he had expected tire struggles in 95F temperatures.

“I think that was pretty much it [as the best strategy]," he reckoned. "For some reason we just lacked pace. But this morning in the strategy meeting they said it's a two-stop; three-stop is four seconds slower. And last night and this morning they gave us that information. But I was dead set it was a three for me.

“I thought the degradation was going to be super high, particularly as the track temperature today was the highest we've had it in a long, long time. It was a mid-50s to 60 degree [celsius] track temperature. So I thought the deg was going to be massive for us.

“I wanted to start on the soft, but the team were nervous and so they pushed us to start in the medium, which ultimately I think was sub-optimum. I think we probably would have been around the same place. Maybe, just maybe [if] I would have been able to have started in the soft, maybe have got fourth, but it would have been a close one.”