2024-04-06 08:41:00
The Mercedes drivers showed 7th and 9th results in qualifying on the Japanese track, and Lewis Hamilton, who was ahead of his teammate, noted that for the first time since the beginning of the season the car’s behavior made a good impression, and he was enjoying driving.
Lewis Hamilton (7th): “I gave it my all in qualifying. The team did a great job last week and made a number of changes to the car’s setup – essentially this is just the first weekend where I’m not freaking out regarding the settings or constantly experimenting. In general, I work in a more or less normal manner.
In my opinion, the car’s performance is already making a more pleasant impression, so driving gives me pleasure, but it’s just that our rivals are still a little faster than us.
If last year we lost to Red Bull by a second or even more, now it’s only a few tenths, which is already better. I don’t rule out that if we had acted a little differently, we might have won back another tenth.
I think I already know exactly what the weak points of our car are, and I know what to tell the team so that the engineers continue to work in a specific direction. But I think that in tomorrow’s race we will perform even more confidently.
I believe that we will be able to further increase the speed of the W15. We noticed that on different tracks it was very difficult for us to find the optimal settings, and this was repeated every time. In some cases there was a feeling that it was impossible to achieve a good balance. But this weekend the car is running much better and I hope it will be the same in the next races, following which we will just have to work on the speed.”
George Russell (9th): “There is a very intense rivalry between us, McLaren, Aston Martin and Ferrari. If you manage to do a really good lap, you’ll be ahead of the whole group; if you don’t, you’ll be left behind.
We knew that we would have some difficulties on this track. We understand that our car does not cope well with high-speed corners. In qualifying, we go through all these turns even faster, for example, in the first sector, our speed was now almost 25 km/h higher than yesterday, and this is where the weak points of our car appear. Therefore, I hope that at the distance of tomorrow’s race we will cope with the matter better.
I think a lot can happen on Sunday and everyone will be running on different tyres, so we’ll see a variety of formations and that will open up a lot of possibilities.
I think we will have a good race, although the fight promises to be very tight. But if you do everything correctly, you can win back several positions.”
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