‘Not my way of driving’ - What Lewis Hamilton ‘hates’ about F1's current cars

Lewis Hamilton has explained his struggles to adapt to the current generation of F1 cars.

Ahead of this weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix, Mercedes admitted Hamilton has found it harder to perform at his best under the new era of regulations that were introduced in 2022.

The seven-time world champion holds the record for most pole positions in F1 with 104 but has only topped qualifying once in the last two-and-a-half years, while he ended a 945-day wait for victory last time out at the British Grand Prix.

Speaking on Friday, Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin said the new generation of car are “not suiting” Hamilton’s style and revealed he has been “working on how he drives”.

“It’s just with these tyres,” Hamilton said of Shovlin’s comments. “For some reason, they don’t like the way I drive on a single lap.

“I’ve sucked in qualifying for quite a while and I’m still working on it to try and improve. At some stage it will come, I’ve just got to keep working on it.”

Hamilton says he finds it frustrating that the best way to drive F1’s latest cars goes against his natural driving style.

“I would say in my career, I’ve never really had massive problems adapting to tyres. But I’m not sure it’s necessarily tyres, I think it’s the type of car,” he added.

“The car is very… It’s more on a knife edge than ever and it doesn’t like it when you brake late and deep and make a corner a V.

“You have to brake early and roll the speed in and I hate that. That’s just not me. It’s not my kind of way of driving the car. I find that really frustrating.”

Hamilton qualified fifth for Mercedes in Hungary as he outpaced teammate George Russell, who suffered a shock Q1 elimination, for only the third time this season.

“I’ve struggled this weekend with the car, particularly in the heat it’s been really, really difficult to find a balance where the car is not snappy,” he said.

“If you look at the Red Bull and the McLaren, they just don’t have the oversteer. The car is just on rails. For us, the heat makes it worse.

“When we started qualifying and it was cooler, we were in a much better place. As soon as it started to dry and got hotter, then we struggled.”

He added: “I think we could have maybe gone a tenth or two quicker if we’d gone out later for example.

“The track was continuously ramping up, but we definitely couldn’t have done what the guys up there have done.”