Lewis Hamilton is pessimistic about his chance of making any progress from eighth on the grid without intervention from adverse weather during the Monaco Grand Prix. Throughout qualifying, the Mercedes driver looked to be quick enough for the third row before a late red flag in Q3 denied the Briton a chance to improve on his initial qualifying attempt, which was only good enough for P8. Speaking after qualifying, Hamilton bemoaned the timing of the red flag and believes that a wet race would be his only chance of gaining positions. "It wasn't looking too bad before [the red flag], but this sort of thing happens," Hamilton told media, including RacingNews365.com . "I do want it to rain. That's going to make it a little bit better than if I was driving around in the dry in just eighth place. I was seventh [on the grid] here last year and I just drove around in seventh [in the dry-weather race]. "It's very hard to overtake here, so I'm hoping that the weather plays up and creates opportunities. Many people do different strategies and it will be nice to have some luck for once."
Car handling "better", but performance lacking
The Mercedes team introduced updates to the W13 at the previous event in Barcelona, which enabled both Hamilton and George Russell to run closer to the front of the field. Despite the improvements, it was anticipated that the car would still struggle at the Circuit de Monaco, with slow-speed corners appearing to be one of its inherent weaknesses. Hamilton added that, whilst Mercedes had solved the bouncing issues that affected them in practice, the pace deficit to the front-runners remained too large. "[The car was] a bit better, but we seem to be slower. I don't know, I feel like we've improved the car in terms of bouncing," said Hamilton. "We weren't very good in the low speed [corners] in the last race. We weren't actually in the race. [Therefore] I anticipate it will be difficult here."
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