After clinching record equal seventh World title in Turkish GP, two weeks ago. Lewis Hamilton is not showing any signs of compliancy, The Brit is dominant in both practice sessions and he led Bottas in FP1 to a 1-2 finish for Mercedes before clinching P1 in FP2, while his teammate comes home in P3.
As both Championships’ already decided, Mercedes shifted their focus to 2021 season, understanding of the 2021 tyres was the sole focus on Friday. According Andrew Shovlin, Head of track side operations, Mercedes got more time to find both on single lap and on the long run.
Lewis Hamilton set fastest lap time of 1:29.033 in FP1, which is 0.449 seconds ahead of his teammate. In more meaningful second practice session, Lewis clocked 1:28.971 to set the fastest time, 0.347 seconds ahead of second place man Max Verstappen.
Lewis Hamilton
“It felt great to get back out on the track, I just love driving this car. Today felt a bit more like a test day though as we didn’t get to do a lot of qualifying style laps, instead it was a lot of discovery on next year’s tyres. This track works the tyres completely differently compared to the last race in Turkey, it’s a night and day difference. Instead of doing a fast outlap to get temperatures into the tyres, you’re trying to go slow on the outlap to not put too much temperatures into them and keep them from overheating. I wasn’t particularly happy with the balance of the car, but everyone is probably in a similar position as the track was quite slippery and dusty. We definitely got some work overnight to try and improve ahead of tomorrow.”
Valtteri Bottas
“Our day was overall ok, looking at our performance and the general feeling in the car. It was more challenging in the first session and I expect it’ll be the same tomorrow because the track temperatures are higher at that time and there’s more wind as well. Both sessions were slightly messy with traffic and a few mistakes here and there, so there’s certainly more to come. I’m also not fully happy with the balance yet, we’ve got some work to do there. It’s tricky to say where we are competitively as we ran a different programme to everyone else, focusing on the new Pirelli tyres. I think Red Bull are certainly up there, they looked pretty good in FP2. The main challenge in Bahrain is always overheating of the tyres, something we haven’t had for a few races, so we need to adapt our different driving style accordingly. So lots of things to learn for tomorrow from today. “
Andrew Shovlin
“We had decided to focus more on the 2021 tyre evaluation than the usual race weekend preparation today. We’ve not yet had time to go through the data, but we’ve managed to do what we had planned, so hopefully that will give us some useful learning ahead of next season. In contrast, we’re a bit behind compared to where we’d normally like to be regarding the race on Sunday, in part because we’ve not spent as long as normal tuning the car balance, but also because we’ve not done as extensive a long run programme as is normal. We’ve definitely got more to come both on single lap and on the long run as we are not in a great place with the car balance yet, but we’ve still got a bit of track time tomorrow to work on that.”
