2021 Mexico GP : Post-Friday practice reaction from Lewis and Bottas

Mercedes had a mixed Friday practice session at  the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez. Mercedes drivers Valtteri Bottas and Lewis Hamilton finished both practice sessions in top-3 but Red Bull and Max Verstappen set early pace in FP2.

In the morning FP1, Bottas led Lewis to finish 1-2 for Mercedes. The Flying fin completed 28 Laps with a fastest time of 1:18.341, which was good enough for P1. Lewis managed to complete 24 laps with a fastest time of 1:18.417, +0.076s down on teammate’s time.

In the Afternoon FP2, Bottas completed 31 laps with a fastest time of 1:17.725, which is good enough for P2 behind Max Verstappen. But Bottas’ time was +0.424s down Dutch man’s P1 time.

Lewis Hamilton managed to complete 26 laps with a fastest time of 1:17.810, +0.509s down on Verstappen’s session leading time.

Valtteri Bottas

“It was a tricky start to the day with low-grip conditions and the dusty track. This made it hard to get a proper read on the car but nevertheless, it felt not too far off how it should be, and that mean we could fine-tune things for FP2. This afternoon, the car felt okay but there’s still time we need to find because Red Bull look quick. They seem faster than us right now, and they showed strong pace on the Soft tyre on a single lap, so we need to find more time if we want to fight for pole.”

Lewis Hamilton

“The car’s generally feeling okay and we’ve not had any major issues today – we’re giving it everything we’ve got and Red Bull are just a bit quicker than us right now. We’ve been chipping away at the set-up and trying to improve it, but you can see we are lacking a bit of overall downforce here and that shows in the lap times. It was great to see lots of people came out today, and I’m looking forward to continuing the battle this weekend.”

Andrew Shovlin, Head of Trackside operations

“We’ve had a reasonable day, the first session was a bit cleaner than the second but the car and power unit seemed to be coping well with the altitude. We’ve stayed very much focused on our own programme for single lap and long run. It’s clear there is a bit of time to find to Max on the single lap but we’ve got a few balance issues to fix so hopefully we can close that gap a little. 

The long run picture is a bit tricky because we were on different tyres to our competition but the balance is reasonable and the hard tyre seemed to be working nicely. We didn’t come here expecting it to be easy and there is clearly a bit that we need to work on but compared to some of our Mexico Fridays, we’ve got off to a decent start.”