Lewis Hamilton cut a dejected figure after qualifying ninth at the Bahrain Grand Prix on Saturday. On a circuit where he has taken five career victories, his best qualifying lap was 0.9 seconds off Oscar Piastri's McLaren on pole position and nearly 0.6 seconds off Ferrari teammate Charles Leclerc in second place.
The performance left Hamilton ninth on Sunday's grid and, perhaps of more concern, short of an explanation as to why.
"I don't have a lot of answers for you guys, I just wasn't quick today," he told reporters after getting out of his Ferrari. Asked if this was the lowest he'd felt since joining the team at the start of the year, Hamilton added: "It's definitely not a good feeling, for sure."
Four races of false dawns
The first four races of Hamilton's Ferrari career have been difficult to judge from the outside. From the moment he first drove one of the team's cars at its private Fiorano test track, he highlighted just how different it felt compared to the Mercedes cars he had driven over the previous 12 years.
Even for a driver of Hamilton's experience, it immediately became clear that there was going to be a period of adjustment to get up to speed. While that period came as little surprise to the man himself, who often reiterated the huge challenge he faced in swapping teams this late in his career, it meant he would inevitably struggle to live up to the hype generated over the winter by his arrival at Ferrari.
A shock pole position and victory in China's sprint race provided team and driver a tangible result to point to following a disappointing debut together at the first round in Australia. But the China sprint has proved an anomaly in Hamilton's early-season form, and his inability to replicate that kind of performance, including in the Chinese Grand Prix itself, has only underlined the difficulty of the task at hand.
By the end of the third round in Japan, Hamilton felt he had made progress and, even more promisingly, said the team had found something on his car that would immediately bring him a tenth of a second in lap time relative to Leclerc. Considering the average gap between the teammates across the first four qualifying sessions of the season (Australia, China sprint, China and Japan) had been 0.048 seconds in Leclerc's favour, it had the potential to be a gamechanger for Hamilton in Bahrain.
By all accounts, the mysterious difference between the cars was rectified for Bahrain, but that only made the reality of the qualifying session all the more brutal for Hamilton.
In Q1 he was marginally faster than Leclerc, in Q2 he was 0.285 seconds slower than his teammate and in Q3, when it really mattered, he was 0.597 seconds off his teammate -- a bigger gap than at any point this year. It didn't help that Hamilton's first lap in Q3 was deleted for a track limits violation at Turn 13, but it was of little relevance to the end result as his first attempt was still substantially slower than his second.
Although Hamilton was at a loss to explain the deficit to Leclerc after the session, his telemetry provided some answers. Through the first six corners of the lap, he was matching his teammate, before losing a fraction of a second in Turn 7 and then more than 0.2 seconds in the slow-speed Turn 8.
Leclerc carried 4 kph more speed through Turn 8 and again through Turn 10, resulting in a 0.3 seconds lap time advantage over Hamilton on the back straight toward Turn 11. He was then 10 kph faster than Hamilton through Turn 11 and 12 kph faster through Turn 13 -- the combination of which resulted in another 0.25 seconds in Leclerc's favor.
Perhaps most worryingly of all for Hamilton, there were no lock-ups or snaps of oversteer to account for the 0.55 seconds lost across those four corners -- he simply lacked the pace vs. Leclerc.
What was behind Hamilton's race day turnaround?
By Sunday evening, however, the story of Hamilton's weekend had taken a more positive turn. He moved from ninth on the grid to fifth at the finish, and midway through the second stint seemed to have something of an in-car epiphany.
Ferrari opted for an alternative strategy to the rest of the top ten in Bahrain -- starting both cars on medium tires while the rest started on the soft compound -- meaning it could run longer into the race before making its first pit stops. Both cars were called into the pits on lap 18, with Hamilton dropping to 11th place while Leclerc, who started the race in second, remained in the hunt for a podium in fourth.
On his second lap back on track after the pit stop, Hamilton set the fastest lap of the race up to that point, and over the next eight laps, overtook five cars to move up to sixth place. As a measure of the pace he was able to find in his second stint, Hamilton had a 16.7-second deficit to George Russell in second place when he rejoined after his pit stop, which had shrunk to 11.3 seconds by the time the race was neutralized by a safety car on lap 32. Granted, Russell's tires were four laps older than Hamilton's during that 14-lap period of the race, but Hamilton overtook five cars for position while Russell had relatively clear air in second place.
In a comparison with Leclerc over the same 14-lap period, Hamilton only lost 0.6 seconds of race time despite his overtaking exploits. What's more, once he had passed Esteban Ocon for sixth place on lap 24, he closed the gap to Leclerc by 1.5 seconds over the next eight laps.
Although these comparisons are limited to a 14-lap snapshot of a 57-lap race, Hamilton's pace during that phase was matched by a much better feeling within the car -- and a feeling of optimism for future rounds.
"It was much more positive," he said on Sunday evening. "The middle stint was really ... I felt really aligned with the car, the balance finally was in a good spot and my driving style seemed to be working in that moment. So I learned a lot from today, and this weekend actually -- a lot, probably more than all the other weekends."
He added: "Qualifying is not good enough, but I think if I get the car where it was in that middle stint, and I start delivering both, then you can see I can still race. So if I fix that, it should be a better weekend."
Hamilton has never shied away from the need to change his driving style to adapt to the Ferrari, but knowing exactly what to change has not been a straightforward process. At the last round in Japan, he revealed that he and Leclerc had diverged on setup choices over the weekend, but in Bahrain Hamilton decided to move closer to Leclerc.
It was then during the second stint of the race that he seemed to unlock a better understanding of how to access more performance from that setup -- especially under braking -- and it was those laps before the safety car that provide an avenue of hope for the seven-time world champion ahead of the next round in Saudi Arabia.
"I think what's clear is, as humans, we get really stuck in our ways," Hamilton said after the race. "And I think I have been driving a certain style and a certain way with the same team for such a long time, and now I have moved to a new car and new team and it requires such a different driving style and settings.
"I have been using engine braking [with Ferrari], which we never ever used [at Mercedes], and much different brakes. We're on Brembos and I've been on Cis [Carbon Industrie] for the last 15 years or so. This car just requires a much different driving style. I've been adjusting to that and I think I have been slowly getting it into my head.
"Getting the balance right, what's clear is Charles starts on a setup and he stays with it all weekend, and I was a long way away from him last weekend and at the start of this weekend. Just before qualifying I went close to him, but all the settings are all off and I haven't ... so I've got to do a better job through the weekend. I know I can, and I will."
Team principal Frédéric Vasseur recognizes the challenge Hamilton faces adapting from Mercedes to Ferrari, but says he encourages a bit of soul searching from the 40-year-old when he fails to match Leclerc.
"You won't replace 12 years of collaboration [with Mercedes] in two weeks or in two races [with Ferrari]," Vasseur said. "That means that for sure we need to improve [with Hamilton], but I think this is true for everybody in the team, in the paddock -- the DNA for the whole sport is to try to do a better job.
"I think it's good to have Lewis with this mindset to say, 'OK, I have to improve also myself and to adapt myself to the car.' We will work on the car to adapt the car to Lewis, but he also has to do a step.
"I think this, between us, is done in a positive way and a very constructive way. Now the fact that he was a bit down yesterday evening, I like it. Because if the guy is coming back in P10 and he only says 'It's a shame,' that's not enough. For sure he was disappointed by qualifying because he was much better all the weekend so far."
After the false dawn of the China sprint race, expectations about a sudden step in performance will likely be kept in check ahead of Saudi Arabia, but in moving to a setup closer to Leclerc and understanding how better to exploit it, Hamilton should be in a better place moving forward.
"I've just got to make it easier for myself -- I'm doing it all the hard way at the moment," he said. "I'll try next week to start in a better place and not deviate from that too much. As I said, I think I've figured out how the car likes to drive, so hopefully if I can apply that next week, if I can qualify better I can have a much better weekend."