Despite taking his first victory as a Ferrari driver in the sprint race at the Chinese Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton continued to manage expectations ahead of Saturday’s qualifying session, saying: “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
After a difficult Ferrari debut in Australia last weekend, in which Hamilton struggled for confidence and finished 10th in wet conditions, he looked transformed during Saturday’s 19-lap sprint race.
Speaking after the race, he referenced “yapping” critics who he said failed to understand the challenge of switching teams, and underlined the importance of remaining patient in his pursuit of more victories.
“The amount of critics and people I’ve heard yapping along the way just clearly not understanding, maybe they’ve never had the experience or just unaware, so it’s felt great to come here and feel comfortable in the car because in Melbourne I didn’t feel comfortable in the car.”
He added: “I don’t feel the pressure. I know the Tifosi, the fans, the team wants to win and I know it means everything to them.
“But I said the other day, Rome wasn’t built in a day. One step at a time. We’re not going to get ahead of ourselves. We’re going to continue to push, be diligent and just remember to be focused and calm — these moments get us all excited.
“We’ll be back at our desks after this and focus on qualifying this afternoon. It’s a long, long way, it’s a marathon, not a sprint.”
Asked how satisfied he was to answer to his detractors so early in the season, Hamilton said: “Well, I mean, I’m not really talking back to them or anything like that.
“It’s just that we live in such a strange time in the world that people just love to be negative at any opportunity, even with the smallest, the smallest things, they love to just be negative about it. And I think that’s just, that’s the difficult time that we’re living in, I think.
“So, I see certain individuals, and again, I don’t look, read all the, I don’t really read the news, but I see bits here and there. I see people that I’ve admired for years just talking out of turn. Clearly, some of them really just making uneducated guesses of what’s going on.
“And like I was just saying, there’s a real lack of appreciation. It is not easy moving to a new team that works completely different, a completely different characteristic of a car. It’s not like you just, you don’t just jump in and it’s good. To build long-term success with a team takes time.
“And that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m not trying to jump-start it or get ahead of myself. I’m just taking my time to build with this great team.”
After learning from last week’s Australian Grand Prix, Hamilton said he approached his new race engineer, Riccardo Adami, at the start of this week with ideas on how to improve the car’s setup for China
“Coming into this weekend, straight away on Monday I hit Riccardo up and said, ‘These are the things that I want to start with this weekend — this is more the direction, and I’m much happier with that.’
“It was something I had tested back in Bahrain [during preseason testing in February], and we kind of veered off from there [in Australia]. So there’s been a couple of changes, but from the moment I started driving yesterday, I felt more at one with the car.
“I’m learning along the way still, just how this car … how to maneuver the tools in order to make the car work the way I want it to work. So, I’m really happy with how that came out, given that that is the case.
“But now I’ve got a much better knowledge now of what the car likes and what I need to do to make it faster.”
