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Mercedes describe Brazilian Grand Prix qualifying as deflating

Mercedes describe Brazilian Grand Prix qualifying as "deflating"

17-11-2019 12:08

Lewis Hamilton's pole position drought continues. A P3 in Brazil means the F1 world champion still hasn't qualified on pole since the German Grand Prix in the middle of the summer. After winning their sixth consecutive double world championship last week, James Allison described Mercedes' result as "deflating". 

Team boss Toto Wolff is missing from Interlagos this weekend. It's the first race weekend he's missing since he took over the role in 2013. Allison, technical director of Mercedes is taking lead for Wolff this weekend. 

Hamilton's P3 combined with Valtteri Bottas' P5 can be seen as a poor result for their usual standards. Allison gives a detailed look at what went wrong for the Silver Arrows. 

"This result is a bit deflating, those aren’t grid positions that we would be happy with. It’s not completely out of line with what we saw yesterday, but we expected a little more after the decent results in FP3 this morning. But we didn’t reproduce that form in Qualifying," Allison said. 

Despite this result, Mercedes are still confident they can walk away Brazil with a good haul of points. Hamilton and Bottas have to improve on a number of poor qualifying results over the last few months including last time out in Austin. 

"We’ve still got good enough grid positions that we’ve got a fighting chance of a good race tomorrow, where the track conditions will change a lot again. It’s going to be warm and this is not an easy track for the tyres, so we can expect an interesting race with people looking after those tyres, trying to make a decision between one and two stops," he added. 

"We were just shading the others on race pace in the long runs on Friday, but that was on a pretty cool track with a pretty manky overhead, so it is not a great indicator of what’s going to happen tomorrow."