Lewis Hamilton takes the blame for F1 qualifying blunder in Singapore

After showing massive promise during the opening segments of the Singapore Grand Prix sprint shootout, Scuderia Ferrari driver Lewis Hamilton completely fell apart during the decisive final session. While his team-mate Charles Leclerc managed to secure a solid third-place starting position on the tight Marina Bay Street Circuit, the seven-time world champion will be forced to start Saturday's Sprint race down in sixth place.

Ultimately, the massive drop in ultimate qualifying pace was entirely self-inflicted.

While the rest of the Formula 1 grid utilized multiple cooldown laps to properly prepare their highly temperature-sensitive Pirelli soft tyres for a final flying lap in SQ3, Lewis Hamilton opted to take a gamble. The British driver explicitly requested that his side of the Maranello garage run a completely different tyre preparation sequence, completing only a single cooldown lap before pushing for pole position.

Photo by: James Sutton / LAT Images via Getty Images

The experimental run plan completely backfired. Following the session, the veteran driver immediately held his hands up and took full accountability for the disastrous set-up call.

"In SQ3 we tried a different run plan, which in hindsight wasn’t the right call," Lewis Hamilton told reporters in the Singapore paddock. "The car felt good on the Mediums, but I struggled with rear grip on the Softs, especially on my final lap."

Throughout the earlier SQ1 and SQ2 sessions, the Scuderia Ferrari SF-26 looked incredibly balanced on the yellow-walled medium compound tyres. However, once the grid swapped over to the mandatory red-walled soft tyres for the final shootout, the rear of Hamilton's car completely gave up, resulting in massive oversteer.

"We need to understand whether that came down to tyre preparation, balance or overheating," Hamilton explained, desperately trying to diagnose the sudden lack of mechanical traction.

Despite missing out on the front two rows of the grid, the 41-year-old driver remains highly confident that the fundamental pace of the car is still intact.

"The pace was there earlier in the day, and although it didn’t come together today, we’ll focus on what we’ve learnt and how to extract more tomorrow," Hamilton concluded.

With overtaking notoriously difficult on the narrow, twisting streets of Singapore, Lewis Hamilton will need a massive launch off the line if he hopes to challenge Red Bull Racing driver Max Verstappen—who secured the Sprint pole—and Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team driver George Russell for the podium places.

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