Lewis Hamilton: It’s not easy to accept such a delay

In the first practice session in Miami, the Mercedes riders took the first and second lines, but in the second the situation returned to normal for this season…

Lewis Hamilton (7th): “In the first practice everything went well, but the second confirmed our speed deficit. Like the previous weekends, we are one second behind the front runners.

Great weekend, great place, lots of positivity. We’re just not particularly fast. We try to change something, but in the second training session we again met reality. It’s like a punch in the stomach. It is not easy to accept such a delay. The car was similar to last year.

But we keep working. Tonight we will discuss everything, and tomorrow we will make adjustments to make the car look better. In Melbourne she worked much more efficiently and in Baku she looked better than here. Maybe it’s because of the warm weather, maybe we didn’t guess right with the settings. Let’s see how it turns out tomorrow. Maybe we’ll move up a few positions. Hopefully we can qualify for the final on Saturday.”

George Russell (15th): “The situation is similar to last year, when we were fastest in practice, but on Saturday we didn’t come out of the second qualifying session. The behavior of the car has changed, although when I worked with the compound rubber medium, everything went quite normally. But as soon as I switched to soft tyres, the car lost efficiency.

I think we’re already starting to understand what this is all about. Fortunately, we have time to make improvements by Saturday. Although we are talking about very small speed increases.

The track coverage has been updated and the car’s behavior here is noticeably different from other circuits, so we won’t have all the answers by Sunday. Difficulties are also associated with the fact that it is impossible to change the trajectory here – as soon as one of the wheels is out of it, the clutch immediately disappears. Plus, it’s not entirely clear how the heat will affect what happens, but let’s see what happens tomorrow.

However, if we do everything right, I don’t see any reason to keep us ahead of Ferrari and Aston Martin in qualifying. That’s exactly what we’re looking for…”