Lewis Hamilton is feeling a lot of anger following his fourth consecutive Q1 loss at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix and says he is unsure whether the winter break will be long enough to reset.
Ferrari has had a winless season so far, with the exception of sprint races, and Hamilton is yet to score a podium, but his qualifying form has been particularly problematic towards the end of the year. His 16th place on the grid in Abu Dhabi was actually his best since Brazil, when he was 13th, and he admitted that the off-season break may not have been long enough to mentally reset after four successive early qualifying losses.
“Time will tell,” Hamilton said. “This is the shortest break…I don’t have any plans[to reset]right now, no, I don’t have any plans.
“There are no words to describe the feelings inside,” he added on Sky Sports. “(There’s) an excruciating amount of anger and rage, and there’s not much I can say about it.”
Hamilton crashes in FP3 (Photo above) He had missed a practice run and had intended to let Ferrari repair his car, but after suggesting there was something wrong with the car at the time, he said the potential failure had not yet been diagnosed.
“It definitely doesn’t help when you have (a crash)…you’re going to miss the second run, but the car felt great and I just bottomed out and then lost the back end.
“They had just fixed the car. They saw some bounces coming in and they said it carried through to the end.”
Hamilton’s teammate Charles Leclerc advanced to Q3 and qualified fifth, but he also found himself in a precarious situation early in the session, which he said could be due to Ferrari’s focus on its 2026 car rather than other teams.
“In this session, if you make even the slightest mistake, you’re out,” Leclerc said. “Then for some reason four or five races ago, the other teams, especially the midfield, closed the gap and we lost our competitiveness.
“You can see how tricky the car is and how fully committed you have to go. You either hit the wall or you get through Q1 and then you have to do the same thing in Q2 and then you have to do the same thing in Q3.
“It’s much harder to understand anything from the car when you really have to push it to the limit. I thought in Q2 we would end up in the wall a lot. So it also makes it harder to improve the car by pushing a little less in Q1 and Q2, probably like McLaren and Red Bull. You can understand more of what’s going on with the car. So, for sure, it’s a difficult situation.”
