27/04/2019
NEWS STORY
Ever since winter testing, we've been assured that Ferrari has the edge, yet here we are and the Italian team is 57 points adrift of its rivals, who have three 1-2s to their credit.
Heading into the second day of the Azerbaijan weekend, both Mercedes are over 0.6s off the pace of the leading Ferrari of Charles Leclerc, and while Lewis Hamilton admits that the Maranello outfit has the advantage, he will still be able to battle for pole.
"It's been a bit of an odd day," he said in a masterpiece of understatement, "but I still enjoyed it. FP2 went really well, I was feeling good out there and I was more comfortable in the car than I was last year.
"However, the Ferraris are clearly very quick," he continued, "and it looks like they're quite a bit ahead of us, so we'll need to investigate to see where we are losing time compared to them. It's unlikely that we will find seven-tenths over night, but we'll do everything we can to push the car in the right direction.
"Our long-run pace looked a little bit stronger than our short-run pace," he admitted, "so we'll need to try and find out why.
"It should be a good fight (for pole), I'm always down for a fight and I think that's what the fans want to see, so I'm looking forward to it."
"I'm not really pleased with the laps I did," admitted teammate Valtteri Bottas, "but it's always a bit tricky to find the rhythm in Baku and it takes a bit of time.
"It wasn't easy to get the medium compound up to the right temperatures, but corner speeds will increase due to track evolution, so we should be able to get a bit more energy into the tyres tomorrow."
Check out our Friday gallery from Baku, here.