Hamilton expects “tough weekend” for Mercedes

2013 Bahrain Grand Prix

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Lewis Hamilton believes Mercedes are in for a difficult weekend after the first day of practice for the Bahrain Grand Prix.

“It looks like it’s going to be a tough weekend for us,” said Hamilton. “We’re working as hard as we can and we just need to find more time from somewhere.”

I don’t really know where we’re losing but still at least we got through the day and there’s still positives to take out of it so we’re just going to try and analyse everything and see if we can find some more time somewhere.”

Hamilton said he expects strategy to be “something similar to the last race” with three or four pit stops. “But last race we had a lot of understeer but here we gave rear degradation. We’ve done as many laps as we can to try and probe out the long run. Maybe tomorrow we’ll do some more.”

Asked about the effect of the particularly high temperatures in Bahrain on him and the car he said: “Well one it sucks because you just sweat your arse off.”

“And then the other one it sucks so hard on the tyres that… it’s so hard to look after the tyres, you know the degradation just gets very tricky. I don’t know how some people are able to do it better than others but definitely we’re struggling compared to some others.”

2013 Bahrain Grand Prix

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Image © Mercedes/Hoch Zwei

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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24 comments on “Hamilton expects “tough weekend” for Mercedes”

  1. Good news everyone!

    1. Good news to hear Lewis let off the McL PR leash.

  2. Yeah, I expect the same!! They lack some pace. They are pretty good in race though!

    1. I thought it was in the race where they lost the most time.

      Put it this way, Hamilton got Pole in China, but went backwards during the race, and couldn’t keep up with an injured Lotus.

      Although early days, I estimate that he’ll qualify around 3rd-7th and finish one or two positions behind that position in the race, given no strange incidents.

    2. I don’t think he’ll get Pole, because Vettel, Webber, Raikkonen, Alonso and perhaps Massa all have decent cars, and pose a big threat to him in quali.

      1. Well couldn’t follow the sessions properly, but I believe they are a team in rapid transformation. We will see a good race pace by the duo!

        1. Are we talking about the same team here?
          Mercedes are a team that are generally great in qualifying, but poorer in the race… Even if Lewis and Nico are good race drivers.

  3. Are mercedes reverting to previous form? i.e. quick out of the box/fall behind with development?

    1. Too soon to tell, really. we won’t get a true idea of the order until Spain.

      1. I’d say after Spain. I dont understand why everyone picks Spain as the place the “real” team order is decided.

        1. I thought the real “team orders” were decided in KL already.

    2. It’s not that – not yet anyway.

      It’s just a combination of things. They obviously were very good in the cold, front-limited conditions last year, so they tried to widen that window a bit and they succeed in part. Now, their car seems to like hot conditions more as evidenced by the epic trye mismanagement in the cold Down Under and the excellent pace in the hot Malaysia. As temps dropped towards the end of the Chinese GP, Lewis gradually lost ground, hung on though. So the hot in Bahrain is OK for them.

      However, the W04 still seems to handle front-limited tracks much much more than the rear-limited ones. Melbourne was rear-limited like Sakhir – they were awful there. Sepang and Shangai were front-limited and they actually went well.

      Bahrain is rear-limited, but hot, and with the former looks to have a larger effect I expect them to suffer, but that’s not yet down to mismanagement of the development race, but more to the inherent characteristics of the car. From Barcleona on, the dev race effect should kick in more markedly.

      1. I agree that Mercedes are still more rear limited for their performance, and that is why they are not as good here as they were last race.

  4. “Well one it sucks because you just sweat your **** off.”

    Not pretty image !

    1. The thing though, is had Raikonnen said something like that, everybody would be commenting today on “classic Kimi”. So really, I just want to point out I like the Mercedes Lewis more than the McLaren one. This one seems to be able to say things in the way he wishes to.

      1. To me he seems a bit more likeable since he’s left McLaren. I can’t imagine the Lewis of a couple of years ago being so good-humoured about his pit lane mishap in Malaysia, for instance.

        1. I agree, I didn’t like him at Mclaren but he does seem to be more likeable now

          1. @sonia54 @red-andy @tango

            Wait until thje car starts to fail for no reason xD

  5. And so it begins!

    No not really, it’s still early day to tell i guess because most of these cars are still somewhat identical to their Melbourne specs with only small modifications. When the big packages come in Spain then we can start putting the pecking order together

  6. Interesting to read on the BBC site that Lewis says he thinks the TEAM set the car up wrong.I sure people on here kept posting that he knew how to set up his car and Jenson didn’t.

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