Hamilton: I tried to tune the car for the race

Mercedes racers are already happy not to have lost so much to their main rivals, as they feel qualifying could have been much worse. In the Grand Prix of Bahrain tomorrow they expect to compete for 3rd place.

Lewis Hamilton (7th): “In preparation for qualifying, we were prepared for anything. I woke up this morning thinking we were probably going to fall way back, so the fact that we made it to the last session is already encouraging.

Today we took a step forward, already during practice you had the feeling that the car had become more lively, and suddenly it turned out that the situation had changed for the better compared to yesterday.

But when it came to qualifying, the car no longer seemed fast to me, but we were somewhere in the middle. I hope the direction we’ve taken with the settings will make us look better tomorrow, as I was trying to set up the car for tomorrow’s race, but this made things a bit more difficult for me in qualifying.

It’s not like we’re storming a mountain that we can’t climb, so everything looks more or less positive because I know all the Mercedes base staff are working very hard. I have no doubt that we will be able to catch up, but to do that we really need to focus and work in a way that has never worked before.

George Russell (6th): “Friday we were a bit shocked because we couldn’t figure out why the pace had dropped so much. We made some changes to the settings and the result exceeds expectations. This is of course pleasing, although the situation after the winter tests may be exactly what one would expect.

Our goal this winter was to build a car that would be free of serious flaws and capable of extensive modernization. Last year we probably lost three quarters of the season to troubleshooting, but now it seems to me that it is much more pleasant to drive our W14.

The general impression is that this is a good car and now we need to work on fine-tuning it, trying to increase downforce and speed. This work is already underway, there are positive signs, but we still have a lot to do.

We will not make any major adjustments to the settings before the race. I think we have to fight for third because Ferrari have been very confident in qualifying over the last four years and I’m glad we didn’t lose many of them.

Fernando Alonso is probably a bit of a dark horse, unlike Ferrari, as he showed great pace behind the wheel of an Aston Martin in testing, so I think it will be an interesting battle for third.”