2022 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix: Post-Friday reactions from Lewis Hamilton and Russell

Mercedes’ struggles for the pace continue at the 2022 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. As Lewis finished FP1 in P9 and George in P15 after a difficult start to the day’s running.

The team worked hard to put the W13 in a better place for the evening session and both drivers improved their standings, with Lewis in P5 and George P6. 

Lewis Hamilton

“It’s been an OK day, we still have many of the same problems we had in the last race but we’re working through them. It’s definitely a little bit harder here with the high-speed corners but the grip is really good on the track and we just need to find some speed on the straights. We’ll be heads down tonight, understanding the data from today and putting ourselves in the best position for qualifying tomorrow.”

George Russell

“It’s great to be back on the Jeddah circuit, extremely high-speed and exhilarating for the drivers, but we are still experiencing the same issues we faced last weekend in Bahrain. We know we still have a lot of work to do to close the gap on Red Bull and Ferrari. We’ll be fighting to maximize our opportunities for points this weekend and giving it our all tomorrow in qualifying. Anything can happen around here so it’s important we’re in touching distance to capture as many points as possible.” 

Andrew Shovlin,

“We tried a few more experiments to understand the bouncing issue here, some which made it worse, some which helped, but we don’t yet have a solution to make the problem go away. We can reduce this slightly for tomorrow as it’s affecting the drivers in a few of the corners and costing time.

Compared to Bahrain, the car balance is in a better place and in terms of degradation we’re quite happy with what we have seen today. Our single lap still needs a bit of work but we’ve got the session tomorrow to do that. Overall though, a reasonable day but clearly we still have a bit of work to do before we’ll be troubling Red Bull or Ferrari.”