Lewis Hamilton was downbeat after ending the opening day of practice for the Bahrain Grand Prix in eighth place.
The seven-times world champion, who went without a win all year for the first time in his career last season, was over six tenths of a second off the pace of Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin – which uses the same Mercedes power unit.
Despite its poor showing last year, Mercedes has persisted with its unique approach to the technical regulations which were introduced last year, including its novel ‘zero’ sidepods. But Hamilton indicated yesterday he feels some aspect of the team’s design philosophy is holding it back.
“Do I believe we can close the gap at some stage? Yes, but I think it’s quite hard with concept we have,” he said.
At the W14’s launch the team said it retained the DNA of its flawed predecessor. While the team confirmed at that stage they intended to revise its novel sidepods, Team principal Toto Wolff stressed “our sidepod design is not something that we believe was fundamentally the reason why we didn’t perform.”
Speaking ahead of the second practice session yesterday, Elliott addressed the question of how the team plans to unlock performance from its car. He said they were not leaping to conclusions about its position in the pecking order, and they had met their development targets for the new car.
“In terms of where we’re trying to get to with weight, what we’re trying to do with aero, we were sort of hitting the targets we’d set ourselves,” he said. “We’ll find out whether they were enough.”
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Today will give the first real sign of where the team truly stands, said Elliott. “The first question is: Is there a problem? I think we won’t really know that till we get to qualifying for definite.
“If you look at what we’ve tried to do over the winter, we’ve tried to develop our issues we had in the car and I think, by and large, we’ve done that. But ultimately this is a relative game so until we know exactly where all the teams pan out, and we’ll probably have a good idea after qualifying, at least for this circuit. Then we go from there.”
Although Mercedes plans to evolve its sidepods design, Elliott indicated they aren’t prepared to take the lead of one of their rivals.
“It’s how we…
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