Ferrari ‘quite a bit ahead’ of Mercedes in Baku – Hamilton

Reigning Formula 1 world champion Lewis Hamilton says Ferrari look “quite a bit ahead” of Mercedes heading into qualifying for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

Ferrari dominated when a truncated day of running finally got underway in second practice, with Charles Leclerc heading teammate Sebastian Vettel and ending up over six-tenths of a second clear of Hamilton in third place.

The current championship leader believes it will be very difficult for Mercedes to reduce the deficit to Ferrari in time for qualifying, but stressed he is up for the challenge ahead.

“It’s been a bit of an odd day, but I still enjoyed it,” Hamilton said. “FP2 went really well, I was feeling good out there and I was more comfortable in the car than I was last year.

“However, the Ferraris are clearly very quick and it looks like they’re quite a bit ahead of us, so we’ll need to investigate to see where we are losing time compared to them.

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“It’s unlikely that we will find seven tenths over night, but we’ll do everything we can to push the car in the right direction.

“Our long run pace looked a little bit stronger than our short run pace, so we’ll need to try and find out why. It should be a good fight tomorrow; I’m always down for a fight and I think that’s what the fans want to see, so I’m looking forward to tomorrow.”

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Bottas, who finished fifth in the timesheets and over a second off the pace of Leclerc, was left unhappy with his short runs and conceded Ferrari looks to be the team to beat.

“It’s been a fairly disrupted day which made FP2 more important than usual,” Bottas explained. “We tried to maximise the time on track, adding a few more laps to our original plan for the afternoon after FP1 was suspended.

“I’m not really pleased with the laps I did, but it’s always a bit tricky to find the rhythm in Baku and it takes a bit of time.

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“It wasn’t easy to get the Medium compound up to the right temperatures today, but corner speeds will increase due to track evolution, so we should be able to get a bit more energy into the tyres tomorrow.

“Our long runs felt good and the pace didn’t look too bad either, but we are a bit behind on single lap pace. Ferrari looked really strong, particularly on the short runs, so it will be a tough fight tomorrow.”

Techincal director James Allison added: “We’re not where we need to be lap for the single lap work, but looked reasonably paced for the longer runs.

“So we have a bit of work to do overnight to tidy up the handling to give the drivers the confidence to really smash it around the lap and then hopefully we’ll have a good weekend.”

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