Lewis Hamilton says the progress Mercedes made with its car in the previous race should pay off at this weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix.
Mercedes is not introducing any significant upgrades this weekend, where teams have only a single practice session before qualifying for the sprint race. However Hamilton said they gained useful knowledge about their W15 at Suzuka two weeks ago.
“Nothing’s changed with that car, so it’s going to be the same car this weekend,” he told Sky. “But we understand it a little bit more than the last weekend.
“We did make improvements and so [we’re] bringing some of those learnings into this weekend and then on top of that some new direction again. I think if we could go back, we would have done things differently, that’s the benefit of hindsight and experience.
“So we’ll try and bring that here this weekend and see if we can implement some of those changes we would have perhaps done, perhaps further in Suzuka and hopefully that can find us a bit of performance.”
Mercedes lie fourth in the constructors’ championship, only one place ahead of Aston Martin, after the first four races. But Hamilton’s team mate George Russell believes the similar characteristics of recent tracks have not flattered Mercedes.
“The last three races have all been largely very similar circuits, very high speed nature in Jeddah, in Melbourne, in Suzuka,” he explained. “We saw it was much more competitive in Bahrain, qualifying third and probably should have finished on the podium if it wasn’t for the [power unit] problem.
“So as I said in the last race, if the season started at four different circuits, we could be in a very different position now. Time will tell how we get on this weekend. We have things we need to improve and I trust the team is working their socks off to achieve that.”
Russell concurred with Hamilton’s view that “with the benefit of hindsight, we would have done things differently,” at Suzuka. “But we can only focus on the here and now and focus on the improvements. It has only been four races.”
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Formula 1
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