Lewis Hamilton has pointed to the warmer temperatures and equal engine modes as the reason for Ferrari’s pace advantage at the Bahrain GP.
Though the Italian team had looked fastest in practice, many expected the world champions to still be the quickest over a single lap but they had no response to the speed of the Scuderia in qualifying as Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen swept the front row, leaving the Silver Arrows third and fourth.
A five-place penalty for a gearbox change will drop Hamilton down to ninth on the grid for the race but in general, the Briton conceded Mercedes simply weren’t fast enough.
“Ferrari are just quicker in general everywhere,” he told British broadcaster Channel 4. “They’ve been a bit better with their tyres, they always are in hot places like this.”
“I think we come to a hotter circuit and often the gap closes up a little bit. Ferrari’s maybe got an upgrade, their engine mode is easily as good as ours this weekend, as you can see all the straights they’re just as quick if not a bit quicker.
“And when you get to a hot circuit it’s really difficult to keep the temperatures low in the tyres and that’s something they’ve always been good at.”
The question was put to motorsport boss Toto Wolff whether the 2018 car has maintained the same characteristics of what he nicknamed the ‘diva’ last year and his response was pretty mixed.
“She’s not a diva,” the Austrian said. “I think the drivers feel that the car is very much together but we just lacked the pace today here.
“In the last years, we always seemed to struggle on particular circuits. Bahrain was one where we were successful in terms of results in the past, but also sometimes it was not trivial to find the right set-up.
“It’s interesting that the regulations change, the car’s completely different, the tyres change, but it’s a little bit within the DNA of each car to have strengths and weaknesses, and it seems that these strengths and weaknesses stay, even though everything else changes.”
