Hamilton cannot explain cause of Russian GP troubles

While Mercedes teammate Valtteri Bottas produced a brilliant performance to secure his maiden Formula 1 win in Sochi, Hamilton struggled with a lack of balance and an overheating car to come home in fourth place.

Although he knows the areas where the trouble came from, it is getting a full picture of why things happened that is his focus for the next few days.

The issue is further complicated by the fact that Bottas and he were running similar set-ups.

“I can’t explain it right now, but I will do some work over this week to fully understand it,” said Hamilton. 

“I have some theories about how it felt in the race and qualifying, have some ideas, but lots of work will be done to figure it out.”

Podium chance gone early

Although Hamilton made a good start to challenge Kimi Raikkonen on the run down to Turn 2, he lost momentum as he got boxed in behind Sebastian Vettel under braking.

That dropped him down to fourth and, with his performance then further hampered by the need to cool the engine as he followed the Ferrari, he said from very early on in the event the chance of podium was gone.

“From lap five onwards I just had to slow down and stay in fourth,” he said. “There was lots of turning down of the settings and the unit. I had cutting of one of the cylinders because of the temperatures. I was going to be fourth very early on.

“I was slow from [Saturday] so that doesn’t really change. I think I could kind of match those times at the front maybe but whether I would have lasted as long, probably not with the set-up that I had.

"With the backing off for the temperature, it was losing seven tenths, whatever it was, maybe a second a lap.

Points gap irrelevant

Hamilton lost ground to title rival Sebastian Vettel in the standings, and is now 13 points behind after the first four races of the campaign.

But he says that the shape of the standings is irrelevant for now, and it is much more important that he and Mercedes understand what has gone wrong.

Asked to judge his place in the championship battle, he said: “I don’t. I just don’t think about it right now. It’s not important.

“We need to understand where the speed was this weekend, what went wrong with the setup and come back fighting for the next race.

“There’s still a long way to go, still second in the championship. It’s not the end of the world. Of course I need to recover the pace I had previously.”