- Brazilian Grand Prix - Mercedes
Downbeat Hamilton still eyes 'a fight'
Lewis Hamilton remained downbeat about his wet weather performance during qualifying for the Brazilian Grand Prix but believes he "can have a fight" from fifth on the grid.
Having claimed on Friday that is has been the worst season of his career in terms of his competitiveness in the wet, Hamilton was duly outqualifed by team-mate Nico Rosberg by half a second at Interlagos. However, despite still saying he finds the conditions difficult he is satisfied with his starting position.
"That's kind of where I thought I would be," Hamilton said. "I did my best out there but I'm just struggling ... My car is very twitchy on the power so it's easy to spin; as you saw with Sergio [Perez] it's so easy to do so. But obviously I've got some things to learn.
"We're still there; we can have a fight from there. I'm actually glad that I'm not P4 because I have always started from P4 for God knows how many years! So hopefully from that side I will have a bit more luck."
Expanding on his struggles in the wet at Mercedes, Hamilton said he hopes a new car tailored more to his driving style in 2014 would help.
"Naturally when I was at McLaren I was there for a good period of time and when I went in to the first year I had done a lot of simulator running to really get on top of things and change things to the way that I liked it and the car just seemed to work for me. Over the next couple of years the car was obviously being built for me and my team-mate and I had a lot of input to that.
"Obviously this year's car was built through work with Nico and it was developed with Michael [Schumacher], who drives different to me, so naturally this year has been a very difficult year in terms of really being able to extract the most from the car, so it's actually not a bad year considering it's been my first year in a car that I've not really known. But there are still so many things that I'm learning even this weekend and there have been lots of problems throughout the year.
"Nico's been here for four years now so the stuff that I'm learning I'm sure is similar to the stuff that he was learning in the first year. So I'm hoping next year that I have from this year's experience a much better understanding."
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