Lewis Hamilton and George Russell will hold talks with Mercedes bosses as both raised the same concern after qualifying at the Belgian Grand Prix. The Silver Arrows duo both noted a lack of pace on Friday as the team failed to close the gap on Red Bull despite new upgrades.
Hamilton qualified P4 but will start the race from third with Verstappen set to take a five-place grid penalty on Sunday. However, Russell was stuck down in P8 after failing to make an impact in the mixed conditions.
Both drivers questioned the team’s lack of pace as the pair called for talks ahead of Saturday’s sprint race. Hamilton said: “It didn’t feel bad today. The car genuinely felt pretty decent. Middle sector we are losing a second.
“So I’ve got to go and study it to try and figure out where that is and if there’s any way, with the package I have, that we can close that. But I’ll give it absolutely everything I can tomorrow and hopefully the next qualifying will still be as good.”
Mercedes installed new parts for Spa-Francorchamps with tweaks made to the team’s sidepod. The German marque has updated the inlet design in a tweak on the new concept introduced at the Monaco Grand Prix.
However, the updates didn’t seem to make much of a difference as Russell also bemoaned a lack of performance. The ex-Williams ace added: “We’ve just been off the pace to be honest.
“We struggled in that session. I don’t really know why, I usually love those transitional sessions but every lap we were nowhere so a but to try and review and understand. We know qualifying isn’t everything around here but we would have definitely liked to be higher up the order… The car didn’t feel too bad just slow overall.
“A bit to try and understand. As I said P8 isn’t a horrendous place to start for Sunday but definitely would have liked to be higher up the order.” Team boss Toto Wolff also appeared dejected as he admitted the team were unable to get a read on their new parts.
However, he revealed Mercedes’ set-up changes may have hampered Russell’s overall result. He commented: “Yeah, you can see they have run two very different rear wings and configurations. You can see that Lewis is just able to extract more performance.
“[Russell] has a hit of a barn door at the back. It can be advantageous for tyre performance on Sunday but it didn’t help today. So we need to assess why it didn’t.”
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