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Spanish GP: Practice notes - Mercedes

NEWS STORY
11/05/2018

Valtteri finished the morning session in P1 with Lewis in P2. Lewis set the fastest time in the afternoon, ending the session in P1 with Valtteri in P5

Lewis Hamilton: The day was pretty good, but it was a tricky one because it was so windy out there. Every driver was struggling with the changing direction of the wind. You're constantly arriving at each corner and the wind direction is never the same, so we saw lots of drivers going off. These conditions make it very difficult to define where the set-up needs to go. We got through all our running and were quite fast compared to previous years. We've got some work to do overnight, I'm hoping that it's cooler and calmer tomorrow. I think it is going to be relatively close between the top three teams but I can't really say who is quickest at the moment.

Valtteri Bottas: It's been a good day overall. FP1 was especially promising, the car felt good from the start. We made some changes for FP2, which didn't improve the car, so we reverted back to the original set-up. Today has been a good start to the weekend, but things can change quickly from Friday to Saturday especially since Ferrari and Red Bull looked quick today. I didn't really feel any gain of grip with the SuperSoft compared to the other tyres, so we will have to work on this area for tomorrow.

Andrew Shovlin: It has been a productive day with both cars running reliably and completing their respective programmes. Conditions haven't been especially easy, the wind has been strong and unpredictable which caught out both our drivers on their SuperSoft laps but we weren't the only ones who seemed to be struggling to get all the sectors together. It was difficult to know quite what to expect with the tyres here as the conditions in the winter were so cold, and it is the first time we have run the thinner tread Pirelli tyres. For this reason we spent more time than usual trying to understand how all three compounds compared to make sure we carry good information into the race. Our car worked very well here in the winter but we've seen in the early races that both Red Bull and Ferrari have added a lot of performance and that was also evident today in their performance today. We do need to find a bit of pace, especially on the SuperSoft tyre given that qualifying is so important here, but the car wasn't perfect today so hopefully we can make a bit of progress overnight and give Red Bull and Ferrari a tough time tomorrow.

Check out our Friday gallery from Barcelona, here.

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