Former F1 chief Gary Anderson has called on Lewis Hamilton to stop making excuses with the British racing superstar at risk of his worst-ever season in the sport.
It's been three years of misery for Hamilton ever since the regulations changed for the start of the 2022 season.
Having dominated the sport for close to a decade, Hamilton ended up slipping down the grid and hasn't won a race since the end of the 2021 season.
He managed to finish as the best-of-the-rest last season as Red Bull went on to win 21 of the 22 races.
Lewis Hamilton has had a difficult start to the new season
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But Hamilton has endured his worst-ever start to a campaign having failed to finish higher than seventh in a Grand Prix race.
The 39-year-old appeared to have turned a corner last weekend after finishing second in the China sprint race, but he failed to take that momentum into the rest of the weekend after a dismal qualifying saw him end up 18th on the grid.
Hamilton revealed Mercedes made changes to his car before qualifying, something that confused former F1 car designer Anderson.
The 73-year-old took aim at Mercedes for failing to make the most of their resources and he feels Hamilton must take some responsibility also.
“If I were in Toto Wolff’s position, the first question I’d be asking on Monday morning would be why did we make these decisions to change Hamilton’s setup before the race," he wrote in his column for the Telegraph.
“Why overhaul this setup rather than simply tweaking it? It was a bizarre decision.
“It does, however, characterise Hamilton’s approach to the troublesome Mercedes cars of the current ground-effect era – certainly in contrast to Russell.
“We have to believe what Hamilton says about his setup. Yet when you consider that these regulations came in nearly 50 races ago, for Mercedes still to be ‘experimenting’ like this shows that they are lost.
Mercedes have been unable to challenge at the front
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“Mercedes, with their record and resources, should at worst be fighting for podiums. You could understand teams like Sauber or Williams taking a shot in the dark with a set-up but Mercedes should be optimising what they have.
“Optimisation of the W15 is what Russell’s approach seems to be. He showed what the car can do, this is where they are and Hamilton and the team need to accept that.
“Hamilton still seems to be searching for that magic bullet that will suddenly see him leap to the front. Well, in all my years in motorsport I have never seen that happen.
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Toto Wolff has taken some criticism
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“Mercedes have had a fundamental problem with their car since the start of 2022 and no amount of setup changes will fix it. It should always be about optimising what you have at your disposal, if you can do this it gives you a baseline to work from.
“The excuses must stop at some point. The decision-making process on Hamilton’s side of the garage has to be questioned.
“When Hamilton talks of these out-there setups, they are probably not as wild as he would have us believe.”