Dutch GP: Post-Friday comments from Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes

Mercedes Dutch Grand Prix weekend started with a mixed fortunes, Lewis Hamilton took P1 in first practice session before losing Engine in FP2.

Zandvoort is gonna be tough one for Mercedes and Lewis, as they entered in rivals den. Red Bull and Max will do everything in their power to come away with Pole and win.

In the morning session like many others Mercedes driver duo also lost lot of time due to Red flag caused by Sebastian Vettel. But Lewis managed to complete 17 laps along with fastest lap time of 1:11.500, which is good enough for P1.

Valtteri Bottas completed 18 laps with fastest time of 1:11.738, +0.238s down on his team mate. The Fin’s flying lap was good enough to put him in P5.

In the afternoon things went bad for Mercedes and Lewis, The Seven-time World Champion was asked by his race engineer Bono to stop the car immediately after coming out of the pits.

That means Lewis’ session ended earlier than planned, The Brit finished only three timed laps, with fastest lap time of 1:11.911, +1.009s down on Leclerc’s time.

Bottas comes home in P4 after completing day high 33 laps with a fastest time of 1:11.132, which is +0.230s down on P1 time set by Ferrari.

Lewis Hamilton :

“This track is epic. It brought back so many memories when I first got out there, from when I drove here before. I knew it was great when I was in Formula 3, but in a Formula One car it is just something else. It’s a shame I couldn’t complete more running, but the loss of power cut my FP2 short quite early on. I’ve got some catching up to do and we need to investigate the issue in more detail, but it’s not the end of the world.

The car wasn’t feeling too bad, in the limited running I had, and Valtteri had a productive FP2, so we’ll have plenty of learnings to take from that. It was amazing to see the crowd here today, there were so many people out there and the Dutch fans bring so much energy. I hope it’s a great weekend for everyone.”

Valtteri Bottas :

“Overall, it was a good day for me, and I enjoyed it out on track. It’s an exciting track to drive, with all the banked corners and high-speed sections. It’s got a nice flow and it’s fairly easy to settle into a rhythm. I’m sure tomorrow in Qualifying will be even more fun. It was quite a disrupted day with a lot of red flags, but even so, I got quite a lot of laps in, particularly in FP2 where we did some proper running on both single lap and long runs. I’m sure we have plenty of data to go through. The margins look small, which is nice to see, so everything is possible.”

Andrew Shovlin, Head of Trackside operations

“We’ve had a tricky day with red flags costing us a lot of running time in the first session and then Lewis had an issue with his car, so we had to stop on track. Everyone has struggled with a lack of running so there isn’t masses of data to work with and many had low fuel runs that were compromised with traffic, so we have to expect many teams to move forward tomorrow.

We’re struggling a bit with Turn 2-3, we seem to be losing there on both low and high fuel but we’ve got a bit of time tonight to understand that. There are a few other places we can improve the balance but overall, it doesn’t seem too far off. We have to recover a bit of running with Lewis but there is time to do that in the morning session.”