Lewis Hamilton believes he will need to find a step forward with his Mercedes overnight or he could struggle to reach Q3 in qualifying at the Spanish Grand Prix.
Mercedes was able to gather data relating to its upgraded car during Friday’s two practice sessions but Hamilton ended up 11th overall, over 0.6s off the pace of Max Verstappen and behind the likes of Nico Hulkenberg and Valtteri Bottas. With teammate George Russell only around 0.15s quicker in eighth, Hamilton believes it’ll be tough for both drivers to reach Q3 if Mercedes doesn’t make improvements.
“I think from the pace that I had today it’s a struggle for me currently to get into the top 10, but hopefully we’ll do some changes overnight,” Hamilton said. “I think it’s very, very close between us and that middle bit, after P5 back to kind of P10. It’s really close between us all.
“It’s impressive to see the improvements that everyone seems to have made all around us. You look at (Esteban) Ocon — the Alpines are doing great, you saw the Aston Martin was second just right behind the Red Bull which is really, really impressive. So it’s not going to be easy, that’s for sure.”
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Although a number of changes were made to the Mercedes in Monaco, Hamilton hints there are still familiar characteristics relating to the car’s limitations.
“Yeah, it’s OK. I mean, we’re fighting as hard as we can. I would say it was a difficult FP1 and FP2, just getting on top of the tires and the deg. The car feels like the car.
“It’s so different from last week, of course. I think the long-run pace didn’t look terrible, and we’ve just got to work on trying to figure out how we can extract more over a single lap.”
Hamilton was a fan of of the new track layout, however, with the chicane in the final sector removed.
“Ah, it’s awesome! It’s very fast. I definitely prefer it to the small chicane that we had in the past. It’s much more fun. I’ve not followed anyone through there so I don’t know how that’s going to be in the race, but definitely going to make it tough on deg.”
For Russell, the underwhelming start to the weekend is no cause for concern given what he believes is a Mercedes’ tendency to become more competitive as a weekend progresses.
“I think firstly it was fun to drive around this new version of the Barcelona circuit,” Russell. “It’s gone from one of the worst corners in Formula 1 to one of the best corners in Formula 1. So that’s really enjoyable.
“It’s only Friday so we’ve not learned a huge amount, but we will dig into the data tonight. We know that we are not Friday specialists and we often take a step forward on Saturday and Sunday, which is the right way round for it to be. But we are where we are. A lot of people are bringing updates to their cars and we weren’t expecting to be setting the world on fire. We just need to learn what we can from the info we have and try to move forward tomorrow.”