mercedes
Both drivers looked fast in FP1, regularly trading faster lap times. They were knocked down the order by Norris and Leclerc at the end, but it was still a solid opening bar at a time when Hamilton appeared to impede Norris – the stewards took no further action. While Hamilton also looked fast in the afternoon session, Russell fell back after going wide on his fastest lap. He complained about his rear tires and said the car was slipping, so Mercedes will have to analyze the data overnight to try to fix that problem for qualifying.
Lewis Hamilton – FP1: 1:24.806, P3; FP2: 1:24.119, P5
“It feels very surreal to be my last weekend with the team. I try to be as present as possible and enjoy every moment. I’ve enjoyed driving the car, working with everyone in the garage, with the engineers and I’m just trying to capture the moments.” as much as I can. My goal is to channel all my emotions into the car and the team because I love them very much and, as always, I want to do very well this weekend I have one last chance to try and do it.
“I don’t plan to change the car too much tonight. Obviously we have some work to do as the McLarens are still fast and the Ferraris are also within that combination. So we need to find some time. Overall, however, my feelings with the car were good today. It’s never easy to determine what our pace is on long runs, but today it didn’t seem too bad, so I hope it’s positive for us, ultimately we have work to do on our pace. a single turn And I hope that tomorrow we can be closer to those who precede.”
George Russell – FP1: 1:25.165, P4; FP2: 1:24.534, P13
“Today has been a bit complicated, but it’s only Friday. We’ve also tried a lot of different things today in preparation for next year, as this is obviously our last chance to do it. So, we wanted to be a little more radical with configuration options, see if there is anything else we can learn and try things to develop our learnings and understanding for 2025.
“As we saw, Lewis put in some great laps today. Still, as a team, we don’t seem to be on the pace of the frontrunners on a single lap. McLaren in particular seem to be in a league of their own. “At the moment and their pace in both sessions He proved it again today. Tomorrow I hope the Ferraris will be back in contention, but I hope we can make some improvements overnight and have a more competitive performance than today.”
Andrew Shovlin, Director of Track Engineering
“We’ve had good single lap performance in the last two races, but today we found the soft tire to be quite tricky. McLaren were clearly very quick today and it will be difficult to beat them this weekend, but if you look at Lewis’ lap Then you can see how with some improvements it could be just behind.
“George has a little more to find, but we were experimenting with some new set-up directions and the cars were quite different for low-fuel work. We can undo that work in the simulator overnight, but I hope we find a good solution”. direction in which George can improve for tomorrow. The long-term outlook was better; Lewis was a little bit ahead of George and just like on the one lap, we can see some areas that we should be able to improve and that should get us closer to the front. We will use FP3 to continue the work. Low on fuel and hopefully tomorrow we’ll close the day a little closer to the top of the timing screen.”