F1 News: 2024 proves Hamilton is not good at car design or setups
Lewis Hamilton was very unhappy with the Mercedes W14, thought he was an engineer, and spent countless hours telling the engineers how to design the 2024 W15 Mercedes.
–by Mark Cipolloni–
And they listened to him. What a mistake that was.
His biggest complaint was that the driver sat too far forward in the W14 – by a few inches
The result: The W15 is a lemon. The gap between pole and the Mercedes cars is larger this year than last, and Mercedes engineers are at a loss to understand why.
The Mercedes W15 suffers from the same porpoising problem as the W13 and W14 and in order to dial it out they have to raise the ride height of the car and as a result, it loses downforce in the high-speed corners.
The Chinese GP proved another thing – when it comes to car setups, Hamilton is clueless.
Lewis Hamilton says 2024 has been the worst season of his career to date after finishing ninth in the Chinese Grand Prix and 2nd in the Sprint race.
On a wet track, the British driver qualified on the front row for the Sprint and finished second after wilting like a cheap suit when Max Verstappen put pressure on him. Once past the Brit, Verstappen pulled away from Hamilton by a second per lap.
It was a demoralizing defeat for he and his thousands of fans.
In qualifying for the big race, Hamilton dropped out in Q1 after making a mistake on his fast lap.
Hamilton said that he had devised a major setup change that backfired for the grand prix, after finishing ninth.
“It’s the worst one so far,” Hamilton said. “But we had a second in the Sprint and with better decisions on setup, maybe we would be around where George [Russell] is, but we just have to keep fighting.
“Hopefully, we have some steps forward in the next race. So… until then, we’ll be back at the factory next week, try and position the car a bit better for Miami, and hopefully have a better weekend.”
As for finishing 9th for the 3rd time in 4 races, Hamilton said, “It definitely wasn’t better than expected. We expected to be somewhere around there.
“I thought maybe at the beginning I tapped someone because I have never had so much understeer in my life, so I was turning in at slow speed and waiting, waiting, waiting. So, I thought I had damaged something like some of the others because there was debris going everywhere at one point but it was just the race set-up that I chose that stunk.”
Hamilton’s team principal Toto Wolff confirmed to Sky Sports that the setup choice was clearly in the wrong direction when the team was analyzing the car’s performance on Sunday.
“Well, the race car was also not that fast,” Wolff said. “You can hear him saying the car does not turn, and this is what we’ve been seeing on the data. It [Hamilton’s setup idea] just wasn’t the right thing to do.”