Another Singapore Grand Prix, another struggle for Mercedes. But while the world champions' slump is no longer a surprise, the root cause still appears to be unsolvable.
"It's exactly the same," Hamilton said when asked to compare this year's problems with struggles in previous years. "It's the same things we've had for years here."
Team boss Toto Wolff conceded that the lack of pace is "probably down to the fundamental concept of the car" after major set-up changes ahead of final practice failed to bear fruit and only made the car worse. When it came to qualifying the team reverted to its Friday setup, leaving Hamilton 0.635s off Sebastian Vettel's pole position time and Valtteri Bottas 1.319s adrift.
"Watching the on-board footage it just looks like their car [the Ferrari] has a different level of grip to ours," Hamilton said. "Whether that's downforce or whatever ... I think it's actually more mechanical grip than downforce.
"If you add grip then you can take the car further and faster. The way our car is designed, for years it hasn't worked great here. We have won here in the past, but we weren't really under threat massively from other people.
"I think if it had been closer here last year and a couple of years before then it would been different. But we just lack enough grip and they are in a different place with their cars, and half a second is a good chunk of time obviously."
The challenge for all teams in Singapore is balancing front and rear grip to minimise overheating of the rear tyres while keeping the front tyres in the right operating window. Speaking in greater detail, Bottas explained that a lack of rear grip was the issue, creating problems out of Singapore's slow corners.
"That's been really the thing for me the whole weekend and the harder I tried the more I struggled," he said. "So I needed to control the slides and the wheel slips more than I would want to and the pace is just slow. And if I tried to push harder than it would get even worse, so it's been a little bit of a confusing weekend so far for me."
But the predictability of Mercedes' struggles -- and its strengths at the last two rounds in Spa-Francorchamps and Monza -- means Wolff is not panicking.
"I think it's our yearly wake-up call," he said. "I actually think, and this might sound overly-optimistic and I'm not, that what we've seen today is the pace of the car around Singapore.
"We had years like in 2015 where we were 1.5s off the leaders in a year where we have dominated. So we just need to continue to assess, not making our car less good compared to our enemies in Singapore."
As for Sunday's race, Wolff says his team has to be realistic about what is possible.
"Yes the qualifying result was the worst case with Lewis' main rival for the championship being on pole and loads of cars in-between. Nevertheless, where we are on track is what we expected.
"If there are no DNFs probably the best result is to have the least points lost to Sebastian. "I think on track we are probably the third fastest car. So it's about having a good position after the start and being with the group and then play at strategies. Overtaking is very difficult here and track position is everything. The Red Bull's have the advantage with two cars in the hunt."