Hamilton grateful for 'Q3 return', but issues warning for Ferrari

20:10, 30 Aug

Updated: 20:35, 30 Aug

byKada Sarkozi

Lewis Hamilton was happy to see himself making it through to Q3 in the Netherlands.

While the seven-time world champion was ahead of Charles Leclerc on multiple laps throughout the session, he eventually qualified in P7, one position behind his teammate.

The Briton was glad to return to Q3, after he missed out on making it through on three different occasions since sprint qualifying for at Spa-Francorchamps.

"I tried to have a slight different approach into the weekend. I'm not going to go into details of what that is, but I've got some tweaks before I even got here, then through the weekend," Hamilton began to GPblog among others after the session.

"And it's been a lot smoother. Yesterday's car was a bit unpredictable and I think we made some changes. I think maybe the wind makes it a little bit difficult as well."

"We're looking for progress and I feel like I have had that this weekend. I've not been in Q3 for some time. So I'm grateful for that," he explained.

The Briton is more encouraged with the result overall, but also underlined these are not the positions Ferrari wants to be in.

"Definitely encouraging to, at least on my side of the garage, have a better result. The boys in the garage deserve it and the team deserve it. So I'm happy I could be there or thereabouts.

"But of course, we're not where we want to be. To be seven tenths off, six and a half tenths off in qualifying on a track like this, that's a huge amount. So we've got to try and understand what that is, because Charles was P1 in the last race. But I think we naturally do still have that deficit we've had all year long."

Hamilton positive about smoother weekend

From the beginning of the weekend in Friday, the British driver underlined that he could work together well with the team.

"There's some things I've changed on the way in which enabled me to start on the right foot, on the better foot, you saw my first lap yesterday, it was quickest at the time and then the next lap was a spin. The car is quite unpredictable," he explained.

"We really work well together with the engineers this weekend, it's not been up and down on changes, it's been quite stable, just made small tweaks, and therefore [I've] just been trying to gain more and more confidence in the car."