Hamilton: The team are incredibly supportive

08/02/2013

Following its nightmare start to the Jerez test, things are clearly improving for Mercedes, and nobody could be happier than Lewis Hamilton.

When the Englishman crashed out on Wednesday morning, around twenty-four hours after Nico Rosberg was sidelined by a fire, there were more than a few murmurings of 'told you so' in and around the paddock.

However, with Rosberg completing a record 148 laps yesterday, and Lewis having a trouble-free day morning in which he completed a further 59 laps, the Englishman insists that he's in a good place.

"It's great, fantastic," he told reporters. "The team are incredibly supportive. They all want to do right by me.

"They were caring when I had the incident the other day, they were concerned," he continued, "and they don't really know me that well yet. So I'm already building a bond with them and they are working flat out which is good to see.

"They are energised, fit, some of the guys run on the track. The engineers and mechanics train in the evenings so there's great motivation within the team."

Taking an enforced break as repairs were carried out to the track, the Englishman was delighted to have completed 59 laps this morning, almost four times as many as he managed on Wednesday.

"Yeah, it was good to get some in," he laughed. "So far it's a good foundation to start from, I am quite happy. It's much better than what we started with. The car's been capable of it, it's just that we've had a couple of issues.

"There's a huge amount of work I need to do to fully understand everything," he admitted. "I need to do a lot of studying to understand the car before the start of the season.

"We are catching up now, Nico did 148 laps yesterday so we've already caught half a day there."

Asked about the pecking order at present, Hamilton is as much in the dark as the rest of us, though the McLaren and Lotus is posting good times on the hard tyre. "I've asked the guys to try and predict it, but they don't know," he said. "We don't know what fuel loads people are on so it's just a guess.

"I wouldn't say the times come easily," he added. "You just go out and get the lap. We were able to get the tyres working on the first lap which they struggled to do last year. Here it's quite warm it's not a bad place for us to start, but we definitely need to work and understand the car more."