Lewis Hamilton believes that Mercedes’s improvements from the last race should be beneficial for this weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix.
This weekend, Mercedes is not making any major changes; teams will only have one practice session before qualifying for the sprint race. Hamilton, though, claimed that two weeks ago in Suzuka, they learned important information about their W15.
He informed Sky that “that car hasn’t changed, so it will be the same car this weekend.” But in comparison to last weekend, we now have a better understanding of it.
“We did make progress, and this weekend we’re going to apply some of those lessons along with some fresh insight. With hindsight and experience, we can look back and say that we would have done things differently.
“So, this weekend, we’ll try to bring that here and see if we can put some of those changes into practice—possibly even further in Suzuka—and hopefully that will find us a little performance.”
After the first four races, Mercedes is just one spot ahead of Aston Martin in the constructors’ standings. George Russell, Hamilton’s teammate, thinks Mercedes hasn’t been impressed by the previous tracks’ comparable features.
He clarified, “The last three races have all been held on very similar circuits—extremely high speed nature in Melbourne, Suzuka, and Jeddah. “We saw that Bahrain was much more competitive; we qualified third and, had the [power unit] issue not arisen, probably should have placed on the podium.”
Therefore, as I mentioned in the previous race, we may be in a completely different situation right now if the season had begun at four different tracks.
Time will tell how this weekend goes. We need to make improvements in a few areas, and I have faith that the team is working extremely hard to make that happen.
Russell agreed with Hamilton when he said that in Suzuka, “we would have done things differently with the benefit of hindsight.” However, we are limited to concentrating on the present and the advancements. There have just been four races.
