MERCEDES ISSUE FRANK LEWIS HAMILTON APOLOGY AFTER GEORGE RUSSELL COMES OUT ON TOP AGAIN

' technical director James Allison has admitted that the Silver Arrows should shoulder some blame for not pushing towards team-mate 's set-up for the last weekend.

After a successful start to the weekend with a P2 finish behind Max Verstappen in the sprint race, the seven-time world champion made a critical error at the turn-14 hairpin during qualifying, leading to his first Q1 elimination since the 2022 Saudia Arabian Grand Prix.

Lining up 18th on the grid, Hamilton sliced through the field and, with the help of some impressive Mercedes strategy calls around the safety car, climbed his way back to P9 by the time the chequered flag had dropped.

Addressing the issue that scuppered Hamilton's qualifying, Allison said: "I think we all saw what happened on his second run, which was only his second timed lap therefore, running down the main straight into that bottom hairpin, he just got a little bit out of shape on the braking, went deep and that's 0.7 of a second just there.

"That's quite a big gap without which he would have easily got through to Q3 and whatever. So he would hold his hand up and say 'My mistake, my error'. I think we would be a little more rounded and say we should have actually encouraged more strongly that he was pursuing a programme a bit more like George's.

"So that's our mistake and we should frankly be making a car that is just not so tricky as the one we've got at the moment which is causing the drivers to make very uncharacteristic errors. We have two of the best drivers in the world and locking up at the end of a straight into a hairpin is not in Lewis's recipe book and it's a consequence of the car being too tricky."

While a P9 finish on Sunday represented an impressive recovery drive, Hamilton lost more ground to his team-mate in the standings. The 39-year-old has now finished in ninth place in each of the last three races that he has finished and has failed to record a top-six finish so far this year.

These results leave Hamilton languishing down in P9 in the Drivers' Championship standings, 14 points behind Russell who executed a lonely race to come home in P6 at the Shanghai International Circuit.

2024-04-25T07:31:22Z dg43tfdfdgfd