Hamilton: “Peaky” Mercedes F1 car “a nightmare to drive” in Mexico

Hamilton could only qualify sixth for Sunday’s race, while teammate George Russell was eighth overall.

The seven-time world champion looked like he was going to be in the fight for pole after a late surge in Q2, topping the timesheets.

Speaking after qualifying, Hamilton conceded that the “peaky” nature of this year’s Mercedes made it difficult to extract the maximum from the car in qualifying. 

“I have been struggling all weekend with this car. The car has been a bit of a nightmare to drive, it just doesn’t like this track. 

“We made some good changes going into qualifying, much, much happier with the car. I wish we did it this morning but then Q1 and Q2, we weren’t looking too bad, Q3, the second lap was great but the car is just really peaky. 

“Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t so I wasn’t able to extract much more from it again. I think in a perfect world I could have been fifth but that’s about it.”

Hamilton is predicting a challenging race for Mercedes.

“It’s going to be a real challenge with our car tomorrow,” he added. “We’ve got overheating, brakes overheating, it’s going to be very hard for us to battle for sure.

“I don’t know what kind of race we’re going to have but it’s going to be on the knife-edge.”