Lewis Hamilton says the level of performance Red Bull has is not frustrating but that he hopes Mercedes can put him in a position to fight Max Verstappen like he did in 2021.
Verstappen has won six of the eight grands prix so far this season with Red Bull completing a clean sweep up to now, with Hamilton’s best results coming in Australia and Spain where he was runner-up. After making it back-to-back podiums with third place in Canada – behind Fernando Alonso in second – the gap was its smallest to Red Bull so far this year, and although he acknowledges its a tall order Hamilton hopes Mercedes and Aston Martin can be a match at certain tracks.
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“It’s not a frustration anymore, if it ever was,” Hamilton said. “You know how it is, and you know what you’re faced with, and there’s nothing I can do about their amazing performance. It’s likely that they will win every race, moving forwards this year, unless the Astons and us put a lot more performance on the cars, or their car doesn’t finish.
“It’s not easy with the regulations to find the amount of performance that they have, advantage-wise. They’ve got to be 30 points up on us in certain points through the lap and we’ve got some work to do.
“But it’s not that it’s frustrating … I’m happy to firstly be back in the mix and I’m just hoping at some stage we can have it all a little bit more level so we can get back to some of the good races we had back in 2021. And to have all three of us in a super-tight battle would be sick.”
Despite a major update to the Mercedes in Monaco that appears to have provided a step forward, Hamilton says there are a number of inherent issues with the W14 that won’t be changed until 2024.
“In truth, it doesn’t feel a huge difference to the beginning of the year. There are some elements of the car which do feel different and obviously with the upgrade it’s just simply having a little bit more downforce on the car.
“But the characteristics of the car are very, very similar to what we had earlier on in the year and so for the future, for the next year’s car, you need to take a lot of these different things off and change them for sure. Characteristic-wise it’s definitely not the car that’s going to be able to beat the Red Bull just yet. And so we’ve got to work on that.”