Spanish GP: Mercedes Post- Friday practice reaction

Mercedes continuing their impressive start of 2021 season with a dominant Friday practice display. The team mainly focused on improving tyre and balance understanding on a range of short and long runs.

Valtteri Bottas managed to complete 25 laps during morning session and he led Hamilton to finish P1 & P3 respectively with a fast lap of 1:18.504. Hamilton clocked 1:18.627 lap to go P3 and completed 24 laps in the morning session.

The Seven-time World Champion Lewis clocked fastest time in the after noon session with a 1:18.170 lap time and he led his teammate Bottas to finish the day in P1 & P2 respectively.

Bottas was 0.139 seconds shy of his teammate in the after noon session. Hamilton (32 Lps) and Bottas (31 Laps) racked up huge mileage for Mercedes in the after noon session at Modified Barcelona Circuit.

Lewis Hamilton

“It’s been a good start to the weekend, the track is awesome and our balance is similar to what we had in the last race. It looks close but I think we’ve got good pace – we understand the car and know which direction we need to go balance-wise.

We made some tweaks along the way, I don’t know if the car got better through the session but there were definitely findings there and we’ll analyse the two sessions to hopefully have a better set-up for tomorrow. It’s amazing to see the progress that McLaren, Ferrari and Alpine are making, not just Red Bull, and that puts pressure on us.” 

Valtteri Bottas

“It was a solid day, the feeling in the car was not too bad and no massive balance issues so I’m fairly happy. On the soft tyre, getting both axles working straightaway for lap one is going to be key because the gaps will be so small.

Tonight will be our usual process – fine tune the set-up as best as we can because we know every millisecond is going to be crucial in qualifying. The whole field seems to be close and Ferrari looked strong today but we just need to focus on our performance and extract the maximum from this package.” 

Andrew Shovlin

“We’ve managed to do some good work today, both drivers have a decent balance and we look to be in a reasonable place on all compounds. Ahead of the weekend we were concerned that rear overheating would cause us more issues but things seem to be under control, even in the hotter conditions of the afternoon session. 

We still have work to do getting the best out of the tyre on low fuel as we didn’t find as much time as some but we have a good baseline to work from. Traffic was difficult today, it’s a short lap and it looked like Red Bull may have been affected by that more than ourselves so we’ll work on the assumption that they are very close on pace and we need to find everything we can overnight.”