Lewis Hamilton rues “shocking” qualifying, says weekend is “done”

Lewis Hamilton says his Dutch Grand Prix weekend is effectively “done” after a dreadful F1 qualifying result at Zandvoort.

The seven-time world champion was knocked out in the second session and is set to start 12th after a mistake on his final lap of qualifying. He could also be in trouble with the stewards for potentially impeding Sergio Perez during Q1, an incident which is under investigation.

After qualifying, he told Sky: “It was a pretty shocking session. These things happen, I don’t know what to say. It's done now but it doesn't feel good.

“It all went badly from the moment the situation with Perez happened. I did my best to get out of the way, I was far to the left as possible, but timing was bad.

“It was a domino effect probably from that moment. It just went from bad to worse.”

He added to the official F1 TV channel: "It’s definitely very, very frustrating, naturally, but this is what it is.

"That’s kind of hard. It’s kind of the weekend done and we have to move on to next week.”

Hamilton revealed changes to his W15 car were made overnight after Friday practice which made it a “nightmare” to drive.

“[It was] not ideal,” he explained.

“We made changes overnight and we couldn’t see [what impact that had] in P3, but it’s the same for everybody. We changed the car quite a lot and it was a nightmare today.

“The car was massively snappy today. Yesterday was a lot of understeer and then we tried to dial that out and went more the other way.”

Asked what went wrong for Hamilton, Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff told Sky: “Looking at the previous sessions we were pretty much always among the top three. And then, we just had a car that was on a knife-edge.

“It was very difficult to nurture through the lap. Lots of understeer, snap oversteer and the moment you go over those temperature thresholds, you have no performance anymore.

“That’s why we had this freakish moment where Lewis just fell out in Q2.”