{"id":735520,"date":"2026-06-14T04:35:40","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T04:35:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/735520\/"},"modified":"2026-06-14T04:35:40","modified_gmt":"2026-06-14T04:35:40","slug":"the-trick-behind-lewis-hamiltons-best-qualifying-result-for-ferrari","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/735520\/","title":{"rendered":"The trick behind Lewis Hamilton’s best qualifying result for Ferrari"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lewis Hamilton<\/a> overcame a tricky start to his Barcelona Grand Prix weekend by leaving the track before qualifying, where he took second for Sunday\u2019s Formula 1 contest.<\/p>\n

The Ferrari driver split the Mercedes cars and was just 0.064s behind polesitter George Russell<\/a>, in what was his best qualifying result since joining the Scuderia at the beginning of 2025.<\/p>\n

It came despite largely playing catch-up, as Hamilton gave his seat for opening practice to Ferrari junior Dino Beganovic<\/a> as part of F1\u2019s young driver rules for FP1 sessions.<\/p>\n

This meant the seven-time world champion first hit the track for second practice, where he finished ninth and was 1.2s off the pace before reducing that deficit to 0.7s in final practice.<\/p>\n

That was still a frustrating gap despite the relative improvement, particularly as he was half a second behind team-mate Charles Leclerc<\/a>, but that all changed in qualifying.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the first time ever, I left the track between P3 and qualifying,\u201d reacted Hamilton, whose team-mate crashed in Q3. \u201cI said, \u2018I\u2019ve got to get out of here\u2019, and I went back to my motorhome.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was just on the engineer’s call, just on my phone, but I kind of went where I had a bit of a reset. Came back and I was able to somehow get back on it. So yeah, whatever it did, it worked.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Lewis <\/p>\n

Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari, George Russell, Mercedes, Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes<\/p>\n

Photo by: Sam Bloxham \/ LAT Images via Getty Images<\/p>\n

Hamilton was therefore naturally buoyant, being left surprised by the pace of his heavily upgraded SF-26, qualifying two tenths above championship leader Kimi Antonelli<\/a> in third.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt feels great to be up here,\u201d the Briton added. \u201cThis weekend\u2019s been so difficult. Normally it\u2019s okay to miss P1, but it had a huge offset.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we went into P2, I was just over a second off and then we just didn\u2019t feel quite comfortable enough. P3, again, I was easily four tenths, five tenths off and I was thinking, \u2018jeez, where am I going to get that pace\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI went and left the track between P3 and qualifying. Came back and Q1 I was first. So I knew I had a good balance and I was really comfortable on that first session.<\/p>\n

\u201cQ2 was a little bit harder with traffic and then these guys [Russell and Antonelli] did a great lap. Naturally, congrats to George, but we\u2019re in a good position to be able to fight for tomorrow, so we have a race.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ferrari\u2019s hopes of victory therefore lie with Hamilton on Sunday considering Leclerc starts in 10th and if the world champion were to win, it\u2019d be his first since Belgium in July 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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– The Motorsport.com Team<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lewis Hamilton overcame a tricky start to his Barcelona Grand Prix weekend by leaving the track before qualifying,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":735521,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[262910,49,48,578,262911,930,576,577,932,82,264445],"class_list":["post-735520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-barcelona-catalunya-gp","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-f1","tag-f1-barcelona-catalunya-grand-prix","tag-ferrari","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-lewis-hamilton","tag-sports","tag-the-trick-behind-lewis-hamiltons-best-qualifying-result-for-ferrari"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=735520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/735521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=735520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=735520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=735520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}