Lewis Hamilton leads Red Bull's Daniel Ricciardo and Max Verstappen on a promising day for Mercedes
Hamilton admits that he hasn’t given a thought to the fact that he is currently leading the points table despite a difficult start to a season
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Your support makes all the difference.Mercedes staged something of a revival of their once habitual turbo-hybrid F1 fortunes as Valtteri Bottas and Lewis Hamilton dominated windy practice sessions here at the Circuit de Catalunya outside Barcelona.
The Finn was eight-tenths of a second faster than the Briton in the morning session, when they were on slightly different tyre strategies, before the world champion headed the Red Bulls of Daniel Ricciardo and Max Verstappen in the afternoon. But nobody could be sure just what the true pecking order will be tomorrow.
Beside the high winds, drivers also struggled with Pirelli’s softest compound tyres, the red-sided supersofts, and Hamilton, Ricciardo and Verstappen all used the harder yellow softs to set their best times in the second session.
Hamilton was fastest in 1m 18.259s, with Ricciardo making up for a crash in the morning to post 1m 18.392s to Verstappen‘s 1m 18.533s. Both were in post-penitent mood after apologising to the workforce at the teams Milton Keynes factory after their collision during the recent Azerbaijan GP in Baku, and driving cars which had been radically revised in the intervening days.
The Ferraris of Sebastian Vettel were more than a second adrift after running the supersoft tyres in the first session, but Vettel improved to fourth place with 1m 18.585s on them in the afternoon, with Kimi Raikkonen sixth behind the similarly-shod Bottas. The older Finn had to stop his car with suspected mechanical problems, however.
Crowd favourite Fernando Alonso was a promising sixth in an aerodynamically revitalised McLaren in the first session, behind Bottas, Hamilton, Vettel, Verstappen and Raikkonen, but dropped to 12th in the second; team-mate Stoffel Vandoorne was ninth in both, however, within a tenth of the Haases of Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen and ahead of the works Renaults which use the same powerplant.
Hamilton desperately wants to win from the front here on Sunday, as he did last year when he vanquished Vettel in a straight fight. And he admits that he hasn’t given a thought to the fact that he is currently leading the points table despite a difficult start to a season in which Ferrari have had the upper hand.
"In all honesty I have zero comfortability,” he admitted. “The points lead is not that it's not important to me, it's just empty at the moment, because there's a long, long way to go. Imagine if I got excited now, knowing that we still have all the problems and things… Moving ahead it doesn't really mean anything.”
He came here seeking to get his weekend off to a positive start rather than being on his back foot by the end of the first day, and added, “At the moment I'm punching below my weight. And that's not sufficient enough to win a world championship.
“The day was pretty good, but it was a tricky one because it was so windy out there. Every driver was struggling with the changing direction of the wind. You're constantly arriving at each corner and the wind direction is never the same, so we saw lots of drivers going off.”
It was a similar problem in Baku recently which forced him into locking his brakes and ruining his tyres, necessitating an early pit stop from which he was fortune to recover to win after Bottas and Vettel hit trouble.
“These conditions make it very difficult to define where the set-up needs to go. We got through all our running and were quite fast compared to previous years. We've got some work to do overnight, and I'm hoping that it's cooler and calmer tomorrow. I think it is going to be relatively close between the top three teams but I can't really say who is quickest at the moment.”
The picture was slightly different in race trim, when the indications were that the Red Bulls were fastest from Vettel and the Mercedes.
Hamilton may get his wish. Today’s 24 degree ambient temperature may prove the high point of the weekend, as random showers are predicted for tomorrow’s final practice and qualifying sessions, with scattered thunderstorms possible on Sunday.
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