Lewis Hamilton says he is feeling a lot of anger after his fourth straight Q1 exit at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, and he is not sure if the winter break will be long enough to reset.
Ferrari has had a winless season so far – excluding the sprint races – and Hamilton has yet to score a podium finish, but his qualifying form was particularly problematic in the closing stages of the year. His 16th place on the grid for Abu Dhabi is actually his best starting position since Brazil, where he was 13th. After being knocked out in the early part of qualifying for the fourth consecutive session, he admitted the off-season break might not be long enough to mentally reset.
“Time will tell, time will tell,” Hamilton said. ‘This is the shortest break… Not me [have a plan to reset] not at the moment. I don’t have a plan for anything.
“I have no words to describe the feeling inside,” he added to Sky Sports. “[There is an] unbearable amount of anger and rage and yeah, I can’t really say much about it.
Hamilton crashed in FP3 (photo above) to lose some practice practice and have Ferrari repair his car, but after suggesting something was broken on the car at the time, he said a possible fault had yet to be identified.
“It certainly doesn’t help if you have one [crash] …you miss your second run, but the car felt great, just bottomed out and then lost the rear end.
“They just fixed the car. They saw something bouncing and they said it went all the way.”
Hamilton’s teammate Charles Leclerc advanced to Q3 and qualified fifth, but was also in danger earlier in the session, something he believes could be due to Ferrari focusing more on the 2026 car than other teams.
“These are sessions that are like [we] If we make the smallest mistakes, we’re out,” said Leclerc. “And that’s been the case for four or five races [ago] for some reason the others, especially the midfield, have more or less closed the gap, and we have lost our competitiveness.
“I can see how tricky the car is and how you just have to go flat out, and it’s either in the wall or through Q1 and then you have to do the same thing in Q2 and then you have to do the same thing in Q3.
“It’s much harder to understand anything about the car when you really have to push it to the limit. In Q2 I thought I was going to put it in the wall a number of times, and that makes it difficult to also improve the car, like probably the McLaren or Red Bull do by pushing a little less in Q1 and Q2. You then understand better what’s going on with the car. So yes, it is a difficult situation.”
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