Hamilton hits out at 'yapping' critics after China sprint win

Lewis Hamilton hit out at "yapping" critics after taking his first win for Ferrari in the sprint race at the Chinese Grand Prix.

The seven-time champion followed up his win in only his second event for his new team with fifth place on the grid for Sunday's main event but said he was "optimistic" of a good result.

Hamilton did not identify the people he was referring to but said they "lacked understanding" of how difficult it was to achieve success straight away with a new team.

The 40-year-old said: "People just love to be negative at any opportunity. Even with the smallest things, they'll just be negative about it.

"That's just the difficult time that we're living in.

"I see certain individuals – and again, I don't read the news, but I see bits here and there – 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, just a real lack of appreciation.

"The amount of critics and people I've heard yapping along the way just clearly not understanding. Maybe because they never had the experience or just unaware."

Hamilton had a difficult first race for Ferrari in Australia last weekend, qualifying eighth and finishing 10th.

But he took pole for the sprint event in Shanghai on Friday and followed it up with a dominant win in the sprint, leading home McLaren's Oscar Piastri and Red Bull's Max Verstappen.

"I felt unusually calm in myself," Hamilton said. "I would say definitely more so than usual. I'm generally a relatively calm person, but I think today there was a stillness in me that I haven't felt for a long time

"I got in the car extra early because I just wanted to be present and enjoy it because I haven't been there for a while. Good start. Challenging race.

"It's hard to put into words what it feels like. Obviously it's a sprint race. It's not the main race. But even just to get that is just a good stepping stone to where I'm working towards."

Ferrari made some changes to their car after the sprint, and other teams maximised their own result to leave Hamilton and team-mate Charles Leclerc together on the third row.

Piastri took pole from Mercedes' George Russell and Lando Norris, who won in Australia for McLaren.

Verstappen is fourth on the grid for the grand prix, ahead of Hamilton and Leclerc.

Hamilton said: "We made some changes to improve race performance., It was definitely harder over a single lap.

"The car became quite snappy. The lap wasn't as clean at the end. I probably should have been 0.2secs further up or maybe 0.1secs. We're not too far away but not ideal.

"I feel optimistic for tomorrow, would like to get a good start and jump at least one car. And then slowly work my way up. Tonight I will make a masterplan and then I have to try and execute it."

Leclerc said: "As a team we maximised the potential of the car but the most important thing is we understand where has gone the potential of the car."

Oscar Piastri — Piastri has won two grands prix [Getty Images]

A first for Piastri after 'sending it'

Piastri's pole was his first for a Sunday grand prix, after previously qualifying first for two sprint events.

Starting at the front gives Piastri the advantage going into a race that is expected to be dominated by tyre management after all drivers struggled to keep their rubber in shape in the sprint.

Norris admitted he had made too many mistakes in his quest for pole.

"We've never doubted it's the quickest car," Norris said. "It can just be a little bit feisty at times.

"It's still tricky to drive. We can easily do good sectors every now and then, but putting a lap together. It seems just tricky to understand how to do it consistently enough.

"Oscar's done a good job and I've not done a perfect job. It's tight, so I just paid the price for not doing well enough."

Piastri set two laps fast enough to put him on pole, and underlined the difficulties of the McLaren car when said he had also nearly abandoned his final lap, as Norris had ended up doing.

The Australian said: "My first lap was honestly better than my second lap, but just at the hairpin at the end of the straight I lost a bit of time and didn't do the best hairpin.

"And then the second lap I was about 0.2secs down on myself, so I kind of just went: 'Why not send it into the hairpin?' And I gained those two-tenths back and then found a little bit more in the last corner.

"So yeah, honestly, without that, I was tempted to box [pit] before that. So I'm pretty happy now that I didn't, but it was - I just did a good corner, that's all."

Russell, who was just 0.082secs off pole after making a significant improvement on his final lap, said it was "a real surprise" to split the McLarens and end up on the front row.

But he said it was "a bit of a stretch" to think he could beat the McLarens in the grand prix.

"We know how quick they are. So anything more than a P3 is a big result for any team at the moment.

"I do think they're still a step ahead of everybody. Ferrari were a real surprise in the sprint, but tomorrow's a different game. And we've got the hard tyre - nobody's run that yet. So I expect a slightly different outcome."

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