Lewis Hamilton finishes fourth at COTA after Ferrari understeer issues

The understeer struggle at COTA

Lewis Hamilton finished fourth at the Circuit of the Americas and trailed race winner Kimi Antonelli by 18.515 seconds. He missed the final podium spot by just one second behind Red Bull’s Max Verstappen after he wrestled with his Ferrari SF-26. I see a clear pattern of lost time in the early stages of the race because the car suffered from "massive" understeer. The 41-year-old Briton struggled in low-speed corners, specifically Turn 1, Turn 11, Turn 13, and Turn 15. He says the leaders simply pulled away because the car lacked balance. While teammate Charles Leclerc took second, Hamilton felt he lacked the pace to match the leaders in the opening two stints. He started the race in fifth place. He admits he felt really good during the last stint, but the damage from the beginning was too great.

The wing adjustment failure

The performance gap between Hamilton and Leclerc originated from a failure to find the correct front wing balance throughout the weekend. Hamilton traces the issue back to Friday, when the team ran the wrong set-up in FP1 and then went even further in the wrong direction during FP2. He eventually reverted to a better position for FP3, but he still lacked the experience Leclerc gained from a long run in FP2. Hamilton explains that the car felt good during the lap to the grid, but he faced massive washout and understeer as soon as the race started, which allowed the leaders to pull away and cost him eight seconds. Even though he added four clicks at the first pit stop and another four clicks at the second, he still needed four more clicks to reach the balance Leclerc possessed. He describes the situation as "crazy" because he remained "12 clicks down" on the front wing for much of the event.

There was a subtle difference between the two Ferrari drivers involving the flap and how much wing they used. The difference in the cars meant that Leclerc had the advantage of having found the right load during the practice sessions, whereas Hamilton had to react to the car’s behavior in real-time. He notes that he was "continuously under-hitting it for some reason" during the race, which prevented him from matching the pace of the cars ahead. He says the cars ahead were just pulling away while he was adjusting his settings. He thinks the race was lost in the first two stints because he lost so much time. He remarks that "it’s all shoulda, woulda, coulda" regarding the missed podium.

Strategy errors and championship pressure

Hamilton’s tyre selection and the late virtual safety car further hampered his chance to climb the podium. He chose two medium tyres because the team doubted the performance of the hard tyre, but he believes the hard tyre was actually the best tyre for the race. Because he started on a used set of softs, he lost "two seconds of race time" relative to the new tyres used by the cars ahead. A late virtual safety car ended any possibility of a final-lap battle with Verstappen, which Hamilton says "would have been awesome." This fourth-place result moves him within one point of George Russell in the fight for second place in the drivers’ championship. He admits he has lost a lot of points in the last five races because he has not perfected the set-up. He needs to get on top of these recent set-up woes if he wants to win the battle for P2 by the season’s end. He looks toward Mexico to improve on the errors made in Austin. He believes performance-wise he has been driving well despite the massive understeer.