Hamilton suspects Austin’s bumps caused Mercedes’ “unstable” handling · RaceFans

Lewis Hamilton is hopeful Mercedes will be stronger this weekend in Mexico around a track that is less bumpy than the Circuit of the Americas.

The seven-times world champion endured a miserable weekend at the Circuit of the Americas last week as he failed to convert promising pace on Friday into points on Sunday.

Hamilton was knocked out of grand prix qualifying in Q1 down in 16th place, before spinning out of the grand prix itself on the second lap. The team later pointed to a recorded gust of wind exceeding 40kph as having contributed to his early retirement.

Mercedes brought new upgrades to their W15 last weekend in Austin. Hamilton hopes his performance in Mexico will be stronger than it was last week.

“It really depends if I experience the same problems that I did in the last race with the upgrades,” he said.

“The car was unstable last weekend, but it was a very bumpy track. This is not a bumpy track, so hopefully on a smoother circuit, maybe we won’t have the same problems.

“If we don’t have the problems we had last week then maybe we can be a little bit closer to the front. It’s all a big ‘if’ and I’m just hoping for the positive.”

Mercedes’ technical director James Allison believes the team suffered over the bumps in Austin because they ran their car too low to the ground. He pointed out the car performed well on Friday.

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“Not only did George [Russell] nearly secure the pole in that [sprint race qualifying] session, Lewis nearly smashed it utterly out of the park,” he said in a video released by the team. “He was way ahead of any of the times until he got a bit tangled up with Colapinto.

“Why did that then not materialise in the rest of the weekend? That is the key question for us. My guess is that we were flirting a bit too closely with the ground.

“These cars like running low and you generally pick up lap time as you are able to get the car nearer to the ground. But push it too far and the car starts behaving in a fairly unpleasant fashion. If you just hit a bump wrong, it’ll unseat the car, make the rear end come out on you and just deliver a level of performance that when it’s good, it’s great, but if you just hit a bump at the wrong moment, a crosswind at the wrong time, then you get punished for it.

“My guess is that we were just pushing our luck a little bit too much in terms of how near to the ground we got, how stiff we ran it.”