Lewis: Turkey was my best ever race

Lewis Hamilton reckons his charging drive to second place in the Turkish Grand Prix was the best performance of his entire career.

The British ace had to run a three-stop strategy due to tyre concerns, and McLaren's simulations predicted that he would struggle to finish higher than fifth - especially after he underperformed in qualifying and only managed third on the grid.

Watch Lewis's charge in the race highlights video

But Hamilton stepped up to the challenge, grabbing the lead from Felipe Massa with a superb mid-race outbraking move and ultimately taking a close second.

"I probably drove the best race I have ever done," said Lewis.

"It doesn't particularly matter whether you win or not, it's whether you drive at 100%, whether you extract the most out of the car.

"It's one of those times when you end the race and you ask yourself and the team, could we have done a better job?

"And I strongly feel we couldn't have done a better job."

Hamilton told ITV Sport's Ted Kravitz that his team had inspired him to push ever harder to make the potentially costly strategy work.

"They said: 'You need to push some more, you need to find some more time - the time's in the last sector.

"'You need to overtake Felipe and you could possibly win this race.'

"When I heard that it was more encouragement, so I was pushing more and more and making every second count.

"I really made very, very few mistakes in that race."After the race, Hamilton's bullish demeanour was in stark contrast to his downcast post-qualifying interviews, when he admitted he had been frustrated with himself.

"I'm always hard on myself," Lewis conceded.

"I sat down on Saturday night and I was ticked off; I wasn't particularly happy with the job I did.

"At the end of the day the team give me a car and I've got to go out and drive 100%, and I didn't extract 100% from the car [in qualifying].

"That's why I'm always hard on myself - because we're top drivers, we should be able to do it.

"But it appears to be a lot harder in our car to do a solid lap.

"It looks a lot easier for them [Ferrari], so that's something we need to keep pushing [to address].

"Perhaps we've sacrificed a bit of qualifying pace for race pace, perhaps we need to work on bringing them both up."

Source: Itv.com/f1