Lewis Hamilton he said he feels the benefits Mercedes has achieved with the upgraded car, but does not expect them to be pole position contenders this weekend.
Mercedes brought an extensive package of changes to its W14 for this weekend’s Monaco Grand Prix. They were intended to debut at Imola a week ago, but this race has been cancelled, meaning they are being used for the first time on F1’s slowest track instead.
“I think we have a lot of data,” Hamilton said after Friday’s practice. “This is not the place to finally test improvements, but overall the car felt good.”
He ended the day in sixth position, almost half a second off the pace. “I think in the end it’s a bit of a shame that at the end of the session we weren’t as close as I had hoped,” he continues, “but I definitely felt an improvement. We just have to keep working on it, see if we can squeeze more juice out of the car.”
“In P1 I thought maybe we look pretty good, but for some reason we always look pretty good in P1,” he added. “We missed nearly half a second in this session.
“I think it could have been three-tenths, but I don’t think we had half a second to spare. We’ll see, we’ll work on that and see if we can squeeze more tonight.
He has a firm idea of where the team should take the car ahead of tomorrow’s qualifying session. “It’s very clear where the lack of performance is for me,” said Hamilton. “We’ll talk about it at the briefing.
“We’ll put our heads together and try to figure out how we can do it with what we have. But hopefully it gives us a platform to work on progressing.”
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His teammate George Russell he did not look so confident in the car during practice and was more than two tenths of a second slower than Hamilton in 12th place. He said his team “made a lot of changes” to the car on Friday, “things we would have done on the previous iteration of the car as well, so these new updates are nothing special.
“We’ll be working all night to see what else we can do to get more out of the tyre. We know the basic performance of the car is good and we usually perform better on Sunday than on Saturday. So we have to try to turn them around this weekend.
“It’s not a matter of moments and sometimes it’s a little baked in the car. So I don’t expect tomorrow to be an easy day, but we’ll keep working hard and see what we can do.
Mercedes will have a better opportunity to understand how the update works when they launch it on site Catalonia region next week, Russell said.
“As we said yesterday, Monaco is such a special circuit that it is not the place to judge any updates or changes. We knew this over the weekend so we almost forgot about the upgrades, we will worry about next weekend and just focus on improving here at a unique track.
“Qualifying is obviously the most important part of the weekend, and qualifying is the part of the weekend where we generally struggle. We always do better on Sunday when we look at the last 18 months. So we have to try to figure out some things overnight.
“Some positive signals can be drawn from the session. Definitely improved from FP1. It’s never easy here.
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