Hamilton: We don’t claim to win the championship

Saturday’s Mercedes sprint racers finished outside the top ten, and of course the team cannot be satisfied with such results. Lewis Hamilton has to admit that they are not among the contenders for the championship this year.

Lewis Hamilton (14th): “The result is what it is, but behind the scenes the team is doing a very serious job trying to improve the efficiency of the car. Obviously we have not been successful so far this year, but we are doing everything we can to rectify the situation.

In the past, the team has managed to overcome various difficulties more than once, and most of the specialists I work with have been working in this team for more than two decades. For example, the 2013 season was far from the best, but after that we performed successfully for years.

We remain united, we try to motivate each other, and although it is clear that we are not claiming to win the championship, we are trying to figure out the car, make improvements and we will make progress throughout the year. We can only hope for that now.”

George Russell (11th): “Today was not a very nice day, it was difficult to overtake and although we were able to keep a good pace, we lacked speed on the straights.

Sprint races are very short, rubber degradation has no time to start, and this creates a difference in speeds between cars, and there are opportunities for overtaking.

If until recently we could start well in races, today we couldn’t. Tomorrow tactics will play a key role, we will have to act differently from rivals in order to fight for higher positions and move forward.

Although it’s a tough weekend, it’s not easy to warm up the tires and there are a lot of things we need to sort out so that we can take advantage of the opportunities that may come tomorrow.”

Toto Wolff, Team Principal: “Today we saw that our W13 was not much faster than the cars in the middle of the pack, so overtaking was not possible. If we were in the middle of the pack, the picture would be the same as in previous races, but when we were behind a line of cars that could all use DRS, we don’t have enough speed to move forward.

The minimum task for tomorrow is to fight for the points, although we understand that this is definitely not up to our expectations. We understand the causes of the problems, have outlined the direction of work to unleash the potential of our car and close the gap with the leaders. But so far no solution has been found, so we have to move forward slowly and hope for the results of our scientific research. But everyone on the team is determined to make improvements.”