Lewis Hamilton has admitted the timing of his final run in qualifying wasn't ideal, as he had to negotiate through traffic on his outlap. Hamilton embarked on three timed runs in Q3, but couldn't afford to hang around in order to get all three runs in. Heading out for his final run, Hamilton was gearing up for his final flying lap when he hit a queue of traffic. Forced to negotiate through them, he was half a second down through the first two sectors of his flying lap before making an error and running wide at Turn 9. "Definitely," Hamilton told the media, when asked if that queue had ruined his preparation. "Yeah, in hindsight… I mean, I knew that everyone was just going so slow and I was worried about not having the tyres up to temperature but I went on all the dirty lines. "So I was just picking up all the dirt on the tyres and then a poor exit out of the last corner so already by Turn 1 I was a tenth down and already by Turn 3 I was two tenths down, so no hope in that respect and then naturally tried to over-drive to gather that pace, that time lost, back and it didn’t work." Red Bull's Christian Horner said after the qualifying session that he felt three runs wasn't ideal for qualifying , due to the risk of exactly what Hamilton encountered, but the reigning Champion still felt three runs was the right call for him. "Just I was told that I had three tyres and I could use them all so I said yes, threw everything at it, give it three shots in the hope to close the gap of two tenths to Max," he said. "The last one [was] not great when there’s all those people out there and you’re not able to get the temperature in the tyres. But, you know, as I said, we did everything that we could."
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