Hamilton: After leaving Miami, Mercedes needs to “accept” reality.

The seven-time world champion qualified only 12th fastest in Miami’s sprint competition.

After Mercedes’ failure to qualify for the second round of the Miami Grand Prix sprint qualifying, Lewis Hamilton feels Mercedes “have to accept” its performance.

On his second push lap of the second segment, Hamilton made a small error by touching the wall at Turn 16. As a result, he finished the session in 12th place. George Russell, his teammate, finished the session in 11th place.

For the first time since the 2023 Austrian Grand Prix sprint, Mercedes was unable to position one car in SQ3, even though both cars were within 0.050 seconds of Nico Hulkenberg in 10th place.

Hamilton disputed that this was the case on this occasion. Hamilton has frequently attempted to extract performance from the W15 by using different experiments in the 2024 setup.

“There have been no more experiments, it’s just been trying to make the car work,” Hamilton said.

“It seems like we took everything out of the automobile, but that might just be the speed.

“We just have to accept it that for the moment, it was seven-tenths off.”

Citing the difficulty of passing, Hamilton was pessimistic about adding to his score of 19 points from the five grands prix and one sprint held thus far in 2024, even though the top eight drivers earned points in the sprint.

“I felt really good in FP1, and then in [sprint qualifying], it didn’t feel terrible, it is just that we are seven-tenths off,” he stated.

“That’s precisely how fast our car goes.

“I think the sprint race is going to be tough, I mean we are in 12th, so I don’t expect a huge amount from there to be honest – it is not an easy circuit to overtake on or follow, so we will just try to step into the points if we can.”