Lewis Hamilton addresses his qualifying deficit to George Russell

Lewis Hamilton addressed his qualifying deficit to George Russell and felt that his race pace had kept him in good stead. The F1 legend has not had the best start to the season. The driver was unable to understand what worked best in the car and saw his teammate outperforming him quite regularly.

So much so that George Russell has already established a commanding lead in qualifying head-to-head over his teammate. After 7 races, there's a 6-1 advantage that Russell enjoys over Hamilton. The race pace, however, has been more even between the two drivers. Even in the last race in Imola, it was the better tire management from Hamilton that helped him finish ahead of his teammate.

In a media scrum pre-Monaco GP, Lewis Hamilton was questioned if there was a case of the driver focusing more on the race and giving less priority to single lap pace. Hamilton admitted that his Qualifying had been a struggle for a while now but was happy that his race pace had been helping him even things out.

He told the media, including Sportskeeda:

"I wouldn’t say it’s not been a priority, but the whole weekend has been the priority to improve everywhere. But particularly since the end of last year and then all this year, it has been pretty bad on a Saturday, but it is what it is. I’m going to continue to work on it and so far I haven’t gotten to a strong place, but there are plenty of races left to sort that out."

He added:

"There’s plenty of time iron out all of the creases in my performance and the car’s. I’m not getting too hung up on it, my race performance is pretty decent, so fortunately I can fall back on that.”

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Lewis Hamilton talks about the upgrades that Mercedes is bringing to the car

Lewis Hamilton was questioned about the trajectory of progress he expects to see from Mercedes in the upcoming races. The team is currently stuck in a no-man's land in P4, with the top 3 quite clearly ahead. The German team did bring a few parts to the car in the last few races, but a substantive jump was not seen.

Talking to the media, Hamilton revealed that the progress is going to be more incremental, and it will take time for the team to get back to the level where it could fight at the front. He said in the same media briefing:

“We don’t have any upgrades this weekend, we had the package basically spread over two weekends at the last two races. We have the highest downforce level, which everyone has here, and we have an evolved wing, but otherwise, we don’t really know where we are going to be this weekend. I’m definitely feeling more excited about it compared to the previous two cars, because those two cars were not so great."

Lewis Hamilton has won the F1 Monaco GP multiple times. The driver will be hoping to build on his past success and have a strong race this weekend.