Hamilton: This is the first time I don’t lose patience over the settings

The Mercedes drivers posted seventh and ninth results during qualifying at the Japanese circuit, and Lewis Hamilton, who was ahead of his teammate, noted that the car’s behavior made a good impression for the first time since the start of the season , and that he enjoyed driving.

Lewis Hamilton (7th): “I gave everything in qualifying. The team did a great job last week and made a number of changes to the car’s set-up. This is actually only the first weekend where I’m not worrying about settings or constantly experimenting. In general I work in a more or less normal way.

In my opinion, the car’s performance already makes a more pleasant impression, so driving gives me pleasure, but it’s just that our rivals are still a little faster than us.

If we lost to Red Bull by a second or even more last year, now it is only a few tenths, which is already better. I don’t rule out that if we had done something differently, we could have regained tenth place.

I think I already know exactly what the weak points of our car are, and I know what to tell the team so that the engineers continue to work in a specific direction. But I think we will perform even more confidently in tomorrow’s race.

I believe we can further increase the speed of the W15. We found that on several tracks it was very difficult to find the optimal settings, and this was repeated every time. In some cases there was a feeling that it was impossible to achieve a good balance. But this weekend the car is driving much better and I hope this will be the case in the next races as well, after which we will just have to work on the speed.”

George Russell (9th): “There is a very intense rivalry between us, McLaren, Aston Martin and Ferrari. If you manage to do a really good lap, you’ll be ahead of the entire group; if you don’t, you’ll be left behind.

We knew we would have some problems on this track. We understand that our car does not handle fast corners well. In qualifying we go through all these corners even faster. For example, in the first sector our speed was now almost 25 km/h higher than yesterday, and this is where the weaknesses of our car emerge. That’s why I hope that we can deal with the issue better at the distance of tomorrow’s race.

I think a lot can happen on Sunday and everyone will be on different tires so we will see a variety of formations and that will open up a lot of possibilities.

I think we will have a good race, although the battle promises to be very exciting. But if you do everything right, you can regain several positions.”