MPH - Deflated Hamilton in search of Sainz's zing

The psychology of racing drivers and how confidence relates to performance is a fascinating subject. It’s intimately connected with their car and its development – and the barometer of the team-mate in the other car.

Lewis Hamilton is struggling to access his full potential at the moment and it’s clearly troubling him. By contrast, over at Ferrari, Carlos Sainz has recently got himself into a very good place.

Hamilton’s demeanour post-race in Singapore last week seemed troubled. “I should have been on pole,” he remonstrated with himself, “and from there I could’ve won the race.” It seemed a curious thing to say on the surface, as he’d been nowhere near pole, over 0.4sec adrift and back in fifth, just not with the confidence necessary to fully attack the corner entries. He hadn’t made an error on the lap; it was just a little off the pace. As emphasised by George Russell putting the sister car on the front row, missing pole by just a few hundredths.

His comment was in reference to how fast he’d gone in the race and how that pace might have translated if only he could have got his act together in qualifying. In the last stint he had quickly caught up to Russell as they used their newer tyres to chase down Sainz and Lando Norris. Hamilton was around 0.5sec quicker at this stage. Having been stacked behind Russell as they pitted under the VSC, he was 5sec behind his team-mate as they rejoined. He had this down to 2sec in just six laps and he was even suggesting that George should up his pace. His frustration at not being able to attack Norris because his team-mate was in the way would only have been intensified by the knowledge that the situation was derived from his own shortfall the day before.

He spoke a little more in Suzuka about how the car seemed to have moved towards Russell in its one-lap balance recently and inevitably his hopes about next year’s car having traits more in line with what he needs. He’s still scoring heavily, still racing well, scored a pole position as recently as Hungary in July. But his access to that level of qualifying performance is patchy – and he’s aware of it. Inevitably it will be placing questions in his mind, and those questions seemed to be troubling him in Singapore.

Meanwhile over at Ferrari, things are spiralling upwards for Sainz. As discussed in the Singapore race analysis here earlier in the week, it was his impetus in a test earlier in the year to try to tame the car’s high-speed rear end inconsistency by engineering in a false understeer, so that at least the drivers had more confidence to push. It’s improved the car globally, but Sainz has found more lap time and confidence from the change than team mate Charles Leclerc. To the extent that he’s been the faster-qualifying Ferrari driver three times in a row, on pole for the last two and with the super-composed start-to-finish victory under pressure in Singapore.