Hamilton: I hope we can improve

Mercedes summarized the results of the first day of the Belgian weekend and admitted that the car clearly lacks speed, but the team will do everything they can to make changes by Saturday’s qualifying.

Lewis Hamilton (6th): “Today we weren’t very fast, and I don’t even know what it has to do with because we tried to squeeze everything out of the car that we could. It could be in the tires, their temperature, wing adjustments – there are many factors that can affect speed.

We can’t say everything was that bad, but we lost quite a bit to the leaders. However, this season on Friday this has happened more than once, but on Saturday we managed to make improvements. I hope it will be the same this time.

But in the evening you need to work hard, analyze all the collected information and understand how to increase the speed of the car. The feeling of driving is not the same as during qualifying in Budapest, although the car behaved about the same in practice as there, so I’m not losing hope.

George Russell (8th): “This season we have to constantly solve the problem of tire warming, and today I had problems with tires of all compositions. In such weather conditions, it becomes clear that we certainly have something to work on.

But we know that once we manage to warm up the tires to the desired operating temperatures, the car immediately adds noticeable speed, so we don’t lose the optimism. We are already used to things not going well on Friday, so let’s see if we can make a difference.

There is no guarantee that we will find any speed reserves, but we will do everything we can to fix the problem. Tomorrow we will have a completely new day, the conditions will be very different – I hope the weather will be warm and dry, so we will see how things develop.”

Andrew ShovlinChief Race Engineer: “A fairly difficult day as it started to rain and red flags were interrupted on the track, but we were able to identify the main issues that we will focus on tonight.

We definitely have to pay attention to the speed in one fast lap, as both riders complained that the handling on soft rubber leaves a lot to be desired. Maybe we just couldn’t get the tires to warm up to the right temperatures.

Long runs under such conditions did not allow us to gather much useful information. In the second session we worked on the Hard tires, which was especially difficult because the asphalt was cold and wet, but the tires of the Medium compound in the first practice turned out to be more or less good.

Several drivers get fined, so we have the opportunity to fight for a good result, but for this we have to increase the speed of the car.”