Lewis Hamilton comes clean on his drastic drop in performance at the F1 Chinese GP

Lewis Hamilton has revealed that the major reason behind his drop in performance was the fact that the driver and the team opted to change the setup a bit to make further progress. The driver had a rollercoaster of a weekend in China, where it all began with the driver nailing the sprint shootout.

Lewis Hamilton secured his first-ever pole position for Ferrari at the shootout on Friday (March 21). On Saturday, the driver had a measured race overall where he led from the start and managed his tires to perfection. As a result, the driver ended up securing his first-ever career sprint win. This was also his first major triumph with Ferrari since he joined the team.

Things turned on their head when the qualifying session for Sunday's race commenced. Lewis Hamilton could only secure a P5 grid position and was around three tenths off pole position. The driver was still quite confident of what he could achieve in the race on Sunday.

The race was, however, a big disappointment where Lewis Hamilton just struggled for pace. His teammate Charles Leclerc, who had been a step behind, was hounding him even though he had a broken front wing.

In the end, Hamilton could only finish P6 and then subsequently get disqualified from the race for technical infringement. Talking to Sky Sports, the driver specified that this was a result of the team opting to make a few changes to the setup. He said:

"I’m glad that we tried something. I struggled with performance. Ultimately basically we had a pretty decent car in the Sprint and then we made some changes because we were trying to move forwards and improve the car and we made it quite a bit worse, basically, going into qualifying. Then it was even worse in the race. So unfortunate but very, very hard to keep up with the guys ahead. But lots learnt."

Lewis Hamilton on opting to go for a two-stopper compared to every other driver opting for a one-stop

In the latter stages of the second stint, Lewis Hamilton was quickly being hunted down by Max Verstappen, who had kept his tires in good shape and not pushed too hard early in his stint. When the Red Bull ended up getting much closer to the Ferrari driver, Hamilton rolled the dice and decided to pit for the second time.

In the end, the strategy didn't work as neither Max Verstappen nor Charles Leclerc could be caught by the time the chequered flag came out. Talking about the second stop, Hamilton rued the lack of tire degradation for the cars in front of him as he told the aforementioned publication:

"The pit stop is too long here, it’s a lot of seconds to catch up, and they were still going fast at the end. Max was doing something similar to me and I had much fresher tyres, so it wasn’t great."

Moving on from the Chinese GP, Hamilton would be more or less satisfied, as there was sufficient progress that he seemed to have made over the weekend.