Lewis Hamilton: We all expected more

Both Mercedes drivers earned points in Bahrain, but lost to their nearest rivals…

George Russell (5th): “Strange day. Lewis and I had similar problems. The power source overheated from the first laps and we had to deal with that. It’s a shame that this happened because we started very well.

I managed to stay ahead of Leclerc, who was in second, but a warning appeared on the steering wheel. To cope with the overheating, we were losing tenths of a second per lap, and it was very difficult to keep anyone behind me at bay. It’s a shame we couldn’t show the car’s real potential.

Fortunately, this is not a problem we need to worry about. We made a mistake with the cooling system configuration. We need to understand why this happened and prevent it from happening again. We have sufficient capacity to further cool the power plant. I think without this problem we would have fought for third place.”

Lewis Hamilton (7th): “The winter training has yielded results, I am in excellent physical condition. But I’m disappointed with the result; we all expected more. The race proved difficult, the battle was fierce and tire wear was high. There are many areas where we need to improve. We also ended up further away from Red Bull than we thought.

I’m glad the car was reliable, but driving it wasn’t easy. When creating the machine we did everything we planned, but it is not efficient enough.

I think if I had qualified better I could have finished a few places ahead as the last stint went well. Today I learned a lot about the car to improve it, and I am confident the team will do that.”