At the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton has claimed he would be happy with a steady Mercedes W15 rear end, but he has yet to find it.
Following his and George Russell’s frustrating experience with engine overheating in the season opener in Bahrain, Mercedes headed into the Saudi Arabian GP race weekend hoping for a better performance. However, Hamilton’s start to the new race weekend in Jeddah has been less than ideal.
Hamilton was warned for dangerously blocking Williams’ Logan Sargeant in FP2 and finished practice in eighth place, four tenths slower than teammate Russell. In first practice, the seven-time World Champion was four places and 0.296s slower than his stablemate.
After FP2, Hamilton spoke to media and explained his Thursday troubles by saying he doesn’t feel confident in the W15’s rear end.
“Difficult day, just lacking the confidence in the rear of the car,” he said.
“The set-up we did some work session to session, changed the car quite a bit, but underlying issue with the rear end that I was struggling with, so I had a couple of really big moments out there.
“In these high-speed areas you need to have full faith in the rear of the car and I just don’t have that yet.
“George is a lot happier with his car. We kind of went in different directions today. We were trying different things to try and find the right solution for the car.
“But all I want is something with a stable rear and then I’ll be happy, so that’s what I’m working on.”
The W15’s long-term performance is anybody’s guess, even though Russell was pleased with the low-fuel performance overall, coming in second in FP2 and just 0.2 seconds behind Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso. Mercedes outpaced everyone in practice in Bahrain last Thursday but fell away as qualifying and the race came around.
Although he still thinks that the “perfect window” for the W15 has not been discovered yet, Russell admitted that he and his teammate took polar opposite approaches with their set-up in both sessions.
“Little bit of a scrappy session,” Russell said. “I don’t think we probably had the car in the perfect window.
“I think the lap times looked good in the low fuel. High fuel pace, not too sure where we’re at really.
“But it’s so close again. The Astons have been a bit of a surprise, but great to see they’re up there. We’ve got work to do overnight and see what we can achieve tomorrow.
“We did a lot of testing today. In FP1 Lewis started with one set-up, I started drastically different. And then in FP2 we did a complete opposites, we swapped setups to see what works, trying to learn more about the car, trying to get feedback from us both.
“And it’s still early days, it’s only the second race of the season, it’s a new car, we’ve only been at one circuit beforehand and we need to keep on learning.
“As I said, let’s see what we can do tonight, everybody back home is going to be working hard on the simulator and try and eke out a bit more performance.”
Russell predicts that Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez will once again lead the field, but he is unsure of Mercedes’ race pace and thinks they will be competing with Aston Martin and Ferrari through the remainder of the event.
“It’s a little bit too early to say because I haven’t actually seen the lap times,” he said.
“For sure Max is the quickest, Checo is not too far behind. But it’s difficult to follow at the moment. I think the cars are becoming increasingly harder to follow as the years progress and I think it’s going to be tight again as we saw in Bahrain.
“Ferrari and Aston probably look like our biggest threats and rivals at the moment, but I think it’s going to go down to qualifying,” he concluded.
