“The car felt really good during [first practice],” he told the official F1 station. “And then in [sprint race qualifying], it didn’t feel horrible, but we were seven-tenths off. That’s merely, I believe, the speed of our vehicle.”

Hamilton has made some radical adjustments to his car in previous races that haven’t always succeeded, but he claims that isn’t the case this weekend.

“This weekend we’ve just been [doing] no more experiments, just trying to make the car work,” he went on to say. “So I feel like we extracted everything from the car and that’s just our pace, we just have to accept it for the moment that we’re seven-tenths off.”

Mercedes introduced an upgrade package for their vehicle this weekend. However, with points available only to the top eight in tomorrow’s race, Hamilton was pessimistic about his chances of scoring.

“The sprint race is going to be tough,” he told reporters. “We’re in 12th place, so I’m not expecting much from there.

“It is not an easy circuit to overtake or follow. So [I’ll] attempt to get into the points somehow, if we can.”

Russell stated that the W15 felt better on soft tyres earlier in the day, but battled for pace on the medium compounds used in the first two phases of qualifying.

“During practice, the soft tyre felt great on our car. The pace was good; it was P4. On the medium, we couldn’t find the sweet spot, and I ended up on the wrong side of it.

“It was tight out there. We shouldn’t have been so close to the cutoff. We need to work overnight and improve for the main qualifier.”