Hamilton: I’m not exactly sure why we’re losing

The Mercedes drivers are dissatisfied with the results they showed in qualifying, but they were especially surprised by the speed of the McLaren.

Lewis Hamilton (7e): “I don’t know exactly why we lose. We have to analyze everything. We brought a modified front wing to Silverstone and hoped that would help us move forward, but today’s car was almost the same as before.

Last night we were able to make some progress with the settings, so we looked better in today’s practice. But at the end of qualifying we had problems. Too bad, because before that there were times when it looked like we could show good results.

It’s nice to have so many fans in the stands today and I’m really happy for McLaren – it’s great to see them come back to high positions, it’s great.

When we talk about tomorrow’s race, I just don’t know what pace we’ll set. During practice, everyone was working with different fuel loads, but we didn’t look too bad against the general backdrop either. We’ve changed a lot in the settings, so we’ll see how it goes. But even if our race pace is good, we will have to overtake a few cars, and on this track it’s not that easy.

George Russell (6th): “Judging by the results of yesterday’s practice, we could count on the 17th and 18th results in qualifying, and in the race – on the 3rd and 4th. We certainly managed to make some improvements.

But I was upset to see that I was only half a tenth behind 3rd position, and this could have been an excellent result. It felt like I had a great lap. I don’t think we could have gone much faster.

But I congratulate McLaren, they surprised everyone and the big mystery is what they will be able to do tomorrow. However, we usually do better on Sunday than on Saturday.

The starting field looks interesting: Fernando Alonso and Sergio Perez were clearly worse than they should have been. So we’ll see what we can do tomorrow, but it looks like the McLarens are very fast on this track.”