Monaco GP: Post-Practice Comments from Hamilton and Bottas

Mercedes looks un touchable at the moment in 2021 season title fight, Red Bull’s early challenge also falling apart. Mercedes had a decent outing during Monaco’s Thursday Free Practice sessions, the Champions always try to play low ball game during Practice before turning up their performance on Saturday and Sunday, when things really count.

Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas managed P5 and P6 respectively in a solid, if not spectacular, morning practice session. Lewis set a fastest lap of 1:12.995 in FP1, which is +0.508 seconds down on session Leader Sergio Perez.

Valtteri Bottas set fastest time of 1’13.131 in FP1, it was 0.136 seconds down on his teammates P5 time.

In the Afternoon session, Lewis managed to post fast lap of 1:12.074 on soft tyres after completing 28 Laps, which was good enough for P3. Valtteri managed to post fast time of 1:12.107 on the same compound, which put him P5 on the time sheets.

Lewis Hamilton:

“Everyone loves to drive here – the weather has been great and this track is rapid, absolutely mesmerising, so I’ve enjoyed today. The Ferraris look really strong, which is great, it means more competition.  

For me personally, this is a track where you need to walk before you can run but you’ve got to do that quickly, obviously. The grip on this track is really high this year, they’ve redone the surface so there’s a lot of grip.

Whichever track you go to, the car never gives you everything you want immediately, you need to acclimatise. From a driver’s point of view, you’re experimenting – you’ve got to dial-in your driving style, figure out where you can and can’t push, where you’ve got to give up some time to get some, and you’ve got to really work with the car.

The car is good, we’ve made some decent steps with the balance so generally I’m very happy. I’ve got some changes I’ll make this evening as we analyse today and it’s going to be close tomorrow, which is exciting.”

Valtteri Bottas :

“It’s nice to be back on this track after a two-year gap, it’s still so tight around here with very little space. It’s very demanding and I feel like we still have work to do with the cars – from my side, I’m lacking some front end on this circuit. We’ve had similar issues at other tracks, mainly in mid-corner but here, it’s all slow-speed corners and if you don’t have a good feeling at the front, you can lose time easily. Our car also feels quite stiff on the bumps and cambers in the corners which we’ll look into.

It will be important to turn the tyres on quickly and get them working. Today for the first lap, I couldn’t get them to work immediately so we need to work hard on that for tomorrow. Ferrari look quick, as do Red Bull, so it’s not only about two teams which will be a lot of fun.”

Andrew Shovlin, Head of track side Operations:

“For a Monaco Thursday this one has been relatively straightforward. Traffic is always a feature and as expected, the shorter sessions make it hard to do much by way of long runs. That said, we’ve covered the majority of what we set out to and we have a decent understanding of our limitations and the areas that we need to improve.

This season we’ve learnt to expect Max’s company in the battle at the front but it was a surprise to us to see both Ferraris looking so strong; you don’t need to scrutinise the timesheets for long to see that their pace is genuine – they could be real contenders for the win.

We’ve got an extra day to work on things tomorrow which is handy as it feels like we need to improve both our single lap and long run performance, but Monaco is all about putting together the entire weekend and today was a pretty decent start.”