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F1 driver Jolyon Palmer, who left Renault at the end of 2017, joins the BBC team this season to offer insight and analysis from the point of view of the competitors.
Lewis Hamilton arrived at last weekend's Chinese Grand Prix saying he had been geeing up his team, emphasising that they needed a perfect weekend from everybody to try to eat into his points deficit to Sebastian Vettel after the Ferrari driver's win in Bahrain.
By Sunday, he had done exactly that - but because of the circumstances of a crazy race, rather than anything Hamilton and Mercedes did themselves.
In fact, both team and driver had another difficult race in China, and Hamilton left Shanghai admitting he needed to do a bit of soul-searching to work out what was going wrong.
The weekend started so well, with Hamilton at his dominant best through Friday practice sessions.
But it all changed on Saturday. The temperatures dropped and drivers were struggling with tyre temperatures.
Hamilton suddenly had a woeful final practice session, having a massive spin exiting Turn 10 and many other off-track excursions. And it wasn't all that surprising when he was out-performed by his team-mate Valtteri Bottas in qualifying for the second time in succession.
(BBC)
