Lewis Hamilton has acknowledged that his “bad set-up change” of his Mercedes car at the F1 Chinese Grand Prix cost him dearly.

The seven-time world champion made a positive start to the weekend, taking second place in the sprint on Saturday morning to record his best finish of the year behind Red Bull’s Max Verstappen.

However, Hamilton was shockingly eliminated in the first round a few hours later, and he could only qualify for Sunday’s grand prix in 18th place before moving up into the points in ninth.

After the sprint, Hamilton, who came in three positions behind teammate George Russell, acknowledged that his aggressive set-up decision had eventually backfired.

In the end, I paid the price for my poor setup decision [on Saturday] when I changed the car. Hamilton declared, “I’m going to make sure I don’t do that in the future.

“I advanced and entered the points, but the race was difficult.” I did believe it was the right decision, and the car does appear to function in a small window.

Regretfully, it made the Grand Prix extremely challenging. Nevertheless, the team performed a fantastic job with the pit stops, and George Russell did well to score some significant points.

Because of the amount of understeer he encountered during the race, Hamilton thought his vehicle might be broken.

“I thought maybe at the beginning I tapped someone because I have never had so much understeer in my life, so I was turning in at slow speed and waiting, waiting, waiting,” he said.

“At one point, there was debris all over the place, so I thought I must have broken something like some of the others, but it was just the setup I went with.

“With better decisions on set-up, maybe we would be around where George [Russell, who finished sixth] is but we just have to keep fighting.”