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Mercedes boss Toto Wolff revealed that the reason behind such a big gap between Lewis Hamilton and George Russell in qualifying comes down to a divergence in setups. The two drivers have opted for completely different approaches as one driver is going for more downforce while the other is going for the lesser wing.
Lewis Hamilton has gone for a lower downforce setup compared to George Russell and in Toto Wolff's view this was what proved to be the key difference in pace between the two drivers. At the end of the season, the two drivers were separated by more than half a second.
Lewis Hamilton on his part will start the race in P3 while George Russell could not even make it into the top 5. Talking about the performance of the Mercedes duo, Toto Wolff told Sky Sports,
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"P3 is good. You can see that it’s pretty bunched up from P2 onwards. I think we couldn’t really assess whether our new parts are working because of the tricky conditions so let’s hope for a dry Saturday and dry Sunday."
"You can see that (Lewis and George) are running very different rear wings and configurations and you can see that Lewis is just able to extract more performance of that."
He added,
“George has a bit of a barn door in the back and that can be advantageous for tyre performance on Sunday but didn’t help today so we have to assess why it didn’t.”
Lewis Hamilton happy with his effort in qualifying
Lewis Hamilton was happy with his effort in qualifying as he reveled in the track layout. Admitting that he loved driving in a very hectic session, the Brit told Sky Sports that he was happy with his effort. He said,
"This track is incredible to drive. It was definitely very hectic because it was consistently drying up. It was very slippy at the beginning, difficult to see. Just maximising because you know every lap is going to be faster than the next lap. That's why we were at the end of the pit lane early each session."
He added,
"The team did a great job in getting us out and quick turnarounds. I was head down, just maximining as much as I could. At the end, still a good chunk of Max - pretty impressive. But I'm really happy with the result I've got."
Lewis Hamilton will be hoping to continue building on the momentum of what happened on Friday to Saturday's sprint qualifying and race.
