Lewis Hamilton insists hopes of a fourth career Monaco Grand Prix victory are “out of reach” after slumping to his worst qualifying position since Germany 2018.
Mercedes found itself unable to match Red Bull and Ferrari’s pace throughout the qualifying session, with Hamilton and team-mate Valtteri Bottas struggling to feature in the battle for pole position.
While Bottas salvaged a second row grid slot, Hamilton couldn’t better seventh place that saw him seven-tenths adrift of Charles Leclerc’s pole time.
Hamilton was on a final attempt at the end of Q3 but Leclerc’s crash brought out the red flags and forced him to abandon the lap.
Aware of the slim overtaking chances Monaco presents, Hamilton was left downbeat about his chances of a recovery charge.
“It’s almost impossible to overtake,” Hamilton said. “From where we are it’s pretty much the case, when everyone’s on the same speed.
“Saturday is the day so obviously that really does put for sure the win out of reach, but I guess the minimum will be hopefully seventh.
“Then we’ve got to try and somehow see how we can move forward.”
Mercedes has suffered issues with tyre warm-up in 2021, which Hamilton said didn’t “feel too bad” in practice on Thursday but was “pretty terrible” after set-up changes before qualifying.
“We’ll go back to the drawing board,” Hamilton said.
“I think from my point, I just had such a lack of grip which then leads you to try to kind of overdrive and start pushing to get more from it, but it just doesn’t improve.
“So yeah, difficult one. Obviously, Valtteri was able to get something out of it. But I think we we’ve definitely had some problems today.”
Comments.
Loading comments…