F1 News: Lewis Hamilton Loses Cool With Mercedes Chief – “It Is What It Is”
A heated exchange between Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff was seen by the press after qualifying yesterday at Imola. The 7-time world champion was then questioned as to what was being said.
It’s no secret that Mercedes is dealing with serious issues in regards to its cars’ performance. Porpoising has been the major issue, one which has plagued many of the teams on the grid, but Lewis Hamilton is finally starting to lose his cool as he questions what’s going on.
“How are we so far off man, this is crazy. Did we get through?” he radiod back to the team after qualifying.
He scraped into Q2 by four-thousandths of a second, but his lack of wet grip stopped him from progressing further up the grid with the driver not even getting into Q3 – something that hasn’t happened since 2021 at the Japanese Grand Prix.
On getting out of the car, he grabbed a chat with Toto Wolff who was nearby and cameras saw a rather heated conversation happening between the two.
That’s all internal stuff, so I won’t share that,” Hamilton told the press. “But we’ll just keep working. It is what it is, it’s kind of….(shrugs). We’ll just keep working hard. Each weekend’s a rescue.”
Hamilton also revealed that his team “under-performed”:
“I think we underperformed as a team today. There are things we should have done that we didn’t do and anyways…we’ll work as hard as we can to move up in the sprint race.
“It will be a difficult race but hopefully tomorrow will be better weather-wise and who knows, maybe we can work our way forwards.”
For the sprint race, Hamilton will be starting 13th on the grid with teammate George Russell directly in front of him in 11th.
