Lewis Hamilton predicts a battle for the third quarter if Mercedes cannot fix bad things on Friday. George Russell dropped Crash at the end of his second training.
Lewis Hamilton acknowledged that Mercedes began on weekends in Singapore and had lost his car in his car.
Mercedes is trying to respond to the city of Gulf Marina after a difficult baku compared to last week’s leader. The pilot on Friday fought the team pilot. Hamilton finished both sessions outside the top ten, while teammate George Russell did slightly better in the more representative floodlit session, finishing seventh, but his second practice ended late with a crash into the barriers.
In team radio conversations with race engineer Peter Bonnington during the sessions, Hamilton reported recurring issues with understeer and grip in the street circuit’s slow, twisty corners.
“The car looks very complicated. It’s been a very difficult day,” said Hamilton, who finished 11th, 0.982 seconds off the pace set by McLaren’s Lando Norris. I’ve tried everything configuration wise but nothing seems to work. It’s really very difficult.
We give it our all, and then it turns out you’re a second behind. We just end up a little lost. Not really sure where to put the car.”
Asked about whether set-up changes made to the car between the two practice sessions had made any difference, Hamilton replied: “No. We tried a lot and achieved the same thing.”
And on the evidence of Friday’s form without improvement, Hamilton predicted: “At the moment we won’t be going into Q3.”
Although he may have finished slightly closer to the front, Russell reported similar issues and concerns to Hamilton at the end of the session.
Asked about the crash in the closing moments of P2 which saw him nose the barrier and damage the front of his car at Turn Eight, Russell said: “Not a lot to say, really. It was locked and the front wing was removed.
“It was a really difficult Friday for us. “It’s really delayed. We need to understand why this is happening. I’m sure we’ll find the answer. ยป A large -scale FP1 change has been made to FP2, but in the recent races 12 months ago, the car is not very connected, so you have to go to the bottom. “
Mercedes was difficult to do in the difficult, but they themselves finished behind two RB cars -the gap between McLaren and Ferrari’s headcards that proved the surprise package of the day.
“I have a lot of surprises,” Russell said. Russell was qualified in the front row, and then dropped CRASH in a late Singapore race last year. VCARB [RB] is really fast, and Williams is really fast.
Red Bull doesn’t seem to know. “There seems to be a big gap between the McLarens and the Ferraris, so we’re hoping to be somewhere between that midfield and the top four at the very least. But right now we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
The team’s technical director Andrew Shovlin described the day as “one of the trickiest Fridays of the year so far”. “Although some progress had been made over the long race, neither driver was particularly happy with the balance in the (second) session,” Shovlin said.
The second hour of the race was more encouraging, but there was still a lot of work to be done during the night. McLaren and Ferrari, especially Norris and Leclerc, seemed to have a head start on the others.
We will have to find serious improvements to fight them [on Saturday]. “We’ve also got one eye on some of the teams behind us. We will need to find gains overnight if we are to have a smoother run through qualifying and that is what we are focused on doing.”
