Lewis Hamilton issued a painful one-word response to his double Q1 exit at the F1 Qatar Grand Prix.

Hamilton opted for a pit lane start to trial setup changes for Saturday’s sprint, but was unable to progress any further than P17 and finished well outside of the points.

Main race qualifying on Saturday was a chance for Hamilton to banish the demons which had plagued him on Friday, but was once again kicked out of Q1 and only set the 18th fastest time.

The Brit was a man of few words to Sky Sports’ Rachel Brookes on Friday, claiming the only positive was ‘the weather’, and speaking to the media after qualifying Hamilton had even fewer words to say.

Hamilton only had one word in response to the question, and said: “Yup.”

Hamilton’s Qatar GP nightmare

In his subsequent interview with Sky Sports F1, Lewis Hamilton became slightly more talkative, though still maintaining a tone of deep frustration, as he described his feeling inside the cockpit of the SF-25 to reporter Rachel Brookes.

He articulated a clear contradiction between his personal assessment and the results on the time sheets. “The car felt a lot better, it just didn’t reflect that in the times,” he explained. Hamilton insisted that, subjectively, the car “felt good. Honestly, the car felt a lot better than it was in the rest of the weekend.” He believed they looked okay for potential progress, but faltered at the decisive moment: “We were looking ok and then we just didn’t get the last lap.”

The performance deficit was not exclusive to Hamilton. While his teammate Charles Leclerc managed to scrape into Q3 on both qualifying occasions in Qatar, the Ferrari team as a whole clearly suffered significant performance issues. Leclerc faced considerable challenges keeping the SF-25 straight and on the track, culminating in a dramatic, high-speed spin at Turn 15. Leclerc suffered a full double pirouette, a terrifying spectacle, but fortunately managed to keep the car mostly intact and stay in the session.

However, the final results were still disheartening: Leclerc finished the Saturday sprint race well outside the points in P13, and could only manage to acquire a grid slot of P10—placing him behind direct rivals such as Pierre Gasly, Fernando Alonso, and Carlos Sainz—for Sunday’s main Qatar Grand Prix.

Speaking after qualifying, Leclerc echoed Hamilton’s misery and frustration. He emphatically stated: “I agree with Lewis’ feeling.” Leclerc offered a deeper analysis of the speed deficit: “The car feels quite ok, it doesn’t feel that much off the pace, but when you look at the timings we are very, very, very far [from the pace-setters].” He concluded that the issue was rooted in the car’s underlying performance: “It’s just the performance of the car at the moment, we are not where we want to be. I changed quite a bit on the car since yesterday but I couldn’t extract any more.” This suggested a genuine inability for either driver to extract the necessary raw speed from the Ferrari package this weekend.