Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton were at a loss to explain the world champion’s lack of pace during Styrian Grand Prix practice on Friday.
A week after he dominated all three practice sessions in Austria, Hamilton was only sixth fastest, some seven-tenths off the pace set by Red Bull’s Max Verstappen.
Later, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff admitted the team was “in the dark” as to why Hamilton’s car was “all over the place” and the Briton too was surprised.
“That I don’t know, I can’t really say,” he said on a possible explanation for the large gap. “It (the car) felt relatively normal but it was quite far off so there’s a lot of work that needs to go to try and work out why.
“Honestly, it was feeling good in Practice 1 and at the start of Practice 2 it felt pretty good, then it just started to drop off so, others out there are obviously quick and Valtteri’s obviously got good pace so hopefully tomorrow will be better and we can get a better position.”
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What may put a spanner in the works for Hamilton is the weather, with thunderstorms threatening to washout Saturday and potentially result in the Practice 2 times forming the grid for Sunday’s race.
“Yeah if we have to start it would definitely suck if we didn’t get to qualify, starting further back then I was last week, would definitely make it challenging,” Lewis conceded.
“I’ll try to do the dry dance if there’s a dry dance, make sure there’s no frigging rain for Sunday.”
It was a slightly less stressful day for teammate Valtteri Bottas, however, as he finished just under half a tenth behind Verstappen in second.
And though there were concerns running two races at the same circuit with the same format could have made the second Friday less meaningful, the Finn said otherwise.
“Practice was really useful,” he commented. “We had quite a few things to try, work and analyze after last weekend, so in FP1 we were mainly trying to see if we have been able to fix the reliability concerns we had in the race, last Sunday.
“The team is still looking into that but I think we made progress on that, so that’s good news.
“We also used one extra set of tyres today, as it’s almost certain it will be raining tomorrow. With that tyre I pushed a bit harder, it wasn’t still full qualifying, but it was good fun.”
