LEWIS HAMILTON’S Mercedes team are confident they have fixed their challenger for this season after a mixed spell on track during testing.
The new F1 season kicks off this week in Bahrain where Hamilton and his team-mate George Russell hope to be able to take the fight to world champion Max Verstappen.
Hamilton was second-quickest on the final day of testing behind Verstappen’s team-mate Sergio Perez.
And while he says the team are “not quite where we want to be” he has reasons to be optimistic going into the new season.
He said: “There has been a lot of discovery and the whole team has approached it with the same mentality, working hard, not being complacent and staying focused.
“We’re not quite where we want to be but it’s a good platform to start from. We don’t know where we will be next week, but we will stay positive and continue to push to the maximum.”
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After a tricky day on track last Friday, Merc’s engineering chief Andrew Shovlin says that after a late night spent working on the problem they came up with a suitable fix.
He added: “A fair bit of work took place overnight to find some refinements to the car specification and recover our direction on the set-up.
“We do seem to have made progress; both drivers felt the car was in a much better place across the range of conditions [on Saturday] and the balance is closer to what they require on a single lap and long run.
“It’s clear that we still have work to do on car pace but it has given us a much more coherent picture of where we need to focus our efforts.
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“We’ll be using the time ahead of next weekend to go through the data we’ve collected and aim to extract a bit more lap time.”
Meanwhile, Aston Martin will NOT turn to Sebastian Vettel if Lance Stroll is not fit enough to drive this week.
Stroll suffered wrist injuries when he crashed his bicycle in Spain and was forced to miss all of pre-season testing.
Aston say they will allow Stroll extra time to recover however if he does not pass a fitness test it will be reserve driver Felipe Drugovich who will compete in the race.
Vettel retired at the end of last year, but there was growing speculation he could be lured back for a one-off race while Stroll recovers.
Drugovich has already completed the pre-season alongside Aston’s new recruit, two-time world champion Fernando Alonso.
Source: Motorsport - thesun.co.uk
