Lewis Hamilton hopes Mercedes will do less experimenting on F1 race weekends
The seven-time world champion labelled his car “undriveable” and a “disaster” following a difficult Friday practice at the Canadian GP in which he and team-mate George Russell ran vastly different set-ups as Mercedes sought more answers for their troublesome W13 car, which has been plagued by porpoising and bouncing all season following F1’s rules revolution.
Hamilton qualified fourth in the Montreal rain on Saturday and then went one better in the race, claiming the 184th podium of his career but just his second of a difficult 2022 – the first coming at the opening race in Bahrain.
Canada was the first weekend Hamilton had finished ahead of Russell since Bahrain, and the 37-year-old hopes Mercedes will be less extreme in their set-up experiments on his car as he feels being the team’s ‘guinea pig’ has been hindering his weekends.
“We’re just trying to work… we’re just trying to progress as a team. Moving forward, I think we’ll be a little bit more cautious on doing too many experiments as it really does hinder you through the weekend, especially if you only have practice one and two in the dry and don’t get a FP3, for example,” he said.
“I think there are lots of learnings from this weekend and improvements that we can make moving forwards.
“I really hope, moving to Silverstone… it’s such an important race for us and for me and so I just want to be in a battle with these guys.”
Hamilton says his result in Canada afforded him belief that the Silver Arrows could claw the gap back to Red Bull and Ferrari on the fast-flowing Silverstone circuit at next weekend’s British Grand Prix.
He said: “I think we’re better in medium and high-speed corners probably, than we are in the low-speed corners but we have bouncing, so I don’t know how it’s going to be through Copse and all those places.”
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