After his worst qualifying performance in 12 races, Lewis Hamilton has doubts over whether he will be able to recover from his fourth place grid position at the Russian Grand Prix.
In an uncharacteristic dip in form, Hamilton was half a second off the pace of the battle for pole position at Sochi, leaving him behind the two Ferraris and Mercedes teammate Valtteri Bottas on Sunday's grid. After struggling to extract the maximum performance from Pirelli's tyres during practice on Friday, Hamilton said he encountered a different issue on Saturday as the tyres started to work and the underlying setup of the car left him with armfuls of oversteer.
"I don't think my problem today was with the tyres, it was more with the balance of the car," he said. "We had similar setups, Valtteri and I, but electronically, with the differential and everything, it wasn't best suited for me, I would say.
"I had big snaps of the rear end of the car in the last sector, if you see all those little tiny mistakes, they were all because the rear end was very weak. I lost like half a second in Turn 13 in the last run, half a second through Turns 13 and 14, but I was generally struggling in the last sector.
"It's not every weekend that things go smoothly. Yesterday we struggled to get the tyres into temperature, today we got into the window, the car was completely different from yesterday. We worked towards it but it generally got worse and worse."
Hamilton has staged comebacks from much lower grid positions during his career, but he is concerned that his setup issues and Ferrari's race pace will leave him struggling to move forwards on Sunday.
"Currently we're fourth and it's very difficult to overtake here. Yesterday their race pace was much better than ours, at least than mine. Yesterday I was more than half a second off, so currently there seems to be not many chances to beat them.
"But tonight we'll do some studying and we'll try to turn some things into positives and, who knows, we should hopefully be in a better position tomorrow. After the changes we made for today, hopefully the race pace will be stronger tomorrow."
If the rear instability continues in the race, Hamilton is unsure if he will be able to push as hard as he would like throughout the race.
"Looking at qualifying, with the balance of the car I had today I don't think I'll be able to push flat out from the start to the end of the race, but Valtteri may be able to, he's much happier with his balance and he did a great job today. Maybe tomorrow I'll get in the race and it will be fine -- I hope that's the case but I'll find out when the lights go out."