Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes, Albert Park, 2019

Hamilton: Plenty more to come from Mercedes

2019 Australian Grand Prix

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Lewis Hamilton says the is still more performance to come from his Mercedes despite the team comfortably heading Friday practice for the Australian Grand Prix.

The world champion was eight-tenths of a second quicker than Mercedes’ closest rivals Red Bull and Ferrari, though the latter seemed not to reveal their true pace in the second practice session.

Nonetheless Hamilton believes Mercedes can improve their car a lot overnight.

“I have a positive buzz from driving the car today,” said Hamilton. “This is what I love doing.

“The car feels like it’s in a similar place to where it was in Barcelona, which is positive coming to a different track. We got through our programme really well, there were no issues on track.

“There’s plenty of stuff that we can improve on, but this was not a bad start. What we have to do now is really study and analyse everything, as we always do on a Friday night. But the fact is we’ve got two cars that continue to go around, none of us made a mistake and we kept the cars in one piece. That counts for a lot.”

Valtteri Bottas believes the team have made a step forward since it last ran.

“The car felt better than it did in testing,” said Bottas. “We didn’t bring a lot of new parts to the car, but we were able to optimise the package that we have.”

However Bottas admitted their rivals performance remains unknown. “We haven’t seen the full performance from any of the other teams,” he said.

“We have an idea of how much we can improve for qualifying, but we have no idea how much performance the other teams can still bring.”

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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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22 comments on “Hamilton: Plenty more to come from Mercedes”

  1. Cristiano Ferreira
    15th March 2019, 8:36

    Well at least he is not saying Mercedes are in trouble and are lagging 30 seconds per lap. Still they seemed to do a couple of qualifying runs while the others just stick to their programs.

    1. 2018 Pole Lap 1:21:164, not sure what kind of qualifying runs did they attempt. From the tires usage on FP2 I can say Ferrari had some issues rather Mercedes were doing qualy laps. Ferrari seemed to overheat their tires today whether on purpose for testing or unintentionally.

      1. Last year pole was with car with better downforce due to the front wings.

    2. So you saying Mercedes weren’t doing their programme?

      1. The better question, to me, is. So you’re saying the other teams weren’t doing qualifying runs?

      2. Cristiano Ferreira
        15th March 2019, 15:43

        I mean mercedes were doing something different that most teams did. I doubt they are 0.800 quicker than Red Bull for example and that Ferrari are only 0.100 faster than the Sauber.

        It was pretty close to quali runs. That’s for sure. Lets see whats the real pace today.

  2. I hope f1 “journalists” will learn their lesson here. When mercedes are slow during testing DONT rush to conclusions. Don’t rush out your clickbait articles/videos (I’m looking at you Autosport). You all need to learn to take anything mercedes do or say during testing with a pinch of salt. They do the same thing every year then turn up in Australia and blow everyone away.

    1. Just like the journalists, maybe you should wait until Q3. Ferrari didn’t run a qualifying sim in FP2. They were clearly hiding their hand.

      I still think Ferrari will lockout the front row on Saturday, but maybe Mercedes will not be 0.5s behind as they were claiming at the end of pre season testing.

      1. I think the gap is more related with the cracterictic of this track. Last year (and in many other seasons in the past) the gap between Ferrari and Mercedes on this track was over 0,6sec and the next race Ferrari was on pole. However it is not a good start for Ferrari even if they close the gap tomorrow, it is still far from ideal.

  3. 2 situations regarding HAM: he has no idea what’s going on (with his car) – never had OR he knows very well how good his car is but playing games. He always seem to go to the extremes. So, not taking him for granted anymore!

    1. Just making sure no one is being complacent, if his method is doing it through the media and it has the desired affect on the team as a whole…

      But we’ll see in qualifying, race pace and of course virtual safety car time windows

    2. He doesn’t want his record to be all about the car, that’s why he constantly downplays how superior his car is. And through repetition, some people actually buy it.

      1. But F1 has always been about the car. You will struggle to find drivers who have won the WDC without the best car of which surprise surprise Lewis is also on that list (Others being Hakkinen, Prost, Rosberg Sr to name but a few).

        1. In my opinion, Ferrari had the best car in 1990 till Suzuka :-D

        2. It is, but a driver who wins 5 WDCs doesn’t want to hear that he won at least 3 of them without any competition other than from his teammate.

          1. And that he couldn’t win all 4 because he wasn’t focussed enough to win that one season vs. Rosberg.

      2. @krommenaas – It’s not without reason that sometimes it’s said that in F1 perception is what matters most…

    3. It helps to push the British media in the “Ferrari has the best car” hype. So that when Hamilton beats them, in a car that’s better, it seems like it’s all about him 😉

  4. Haha Hamilton only the other day saying Merc was behind. I’m sure Ferrari will find enough to take the fight to Merc. RB looked OK today but we will see in third practice and qualies tomorrow. Renault seem satisfied at this stage, they did not try to hard to set a fastest…lap hoping of more to come. HAAS and Alfa (Ferrari b) look to be in good shape as well.

  5. Here we have an article about practice performance without a single mention what the fastest time actually was, just a single mention of there being a 0,8s gap to second fastest.

    What was the fastest time?

    1. 1.22.600 vs ~1.23.4 for RBR and Vettel

  6. I am amused by the comments here about the merc and them running away with the championship….Who won the first 2 races last year and when did merc actually win a race? Practice means nothing until the chequered flag.

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