Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton believes that his team “did the best” possible in tough 2023 Bahrain Grand Prix.
Having qualified seventh and not even in the quickest Mercedes powered car, Hamilton enjoyed a strong start to jump Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso plus Mercedes teammate, George Russell to fifth in the order.
Tyre degradation and slower pace though meant that Alonso was able to leap Russell then Hamilton en-route to an eventual third-placed finish for the Spaniard, whilst Hamilton finished fifth after failing to pass Carlos Sainz for fourth in the closing laps.
Hamilton consequently admitted that Mercedes have further fallen down the pecking order than they had done last season, as he said: “We did the best we could today. We are the fourth fastest team right now, and the Ferrari and Aston that we were battling were just quicker than us.
“It was close for a second with Sainz, but I couldn’t hang on and he just went away in the final laps.”
Hamilton however praised Alonso and Aston Martin for their progress over the off-season, as he iterated that they “did a great job” to design a competitive car, which enabled both teams to enjoy “a fun tussle we had for a moment,” but conceded that Aston Martin are quicker.
The seven-time champion though felt that his team “are lacking a lot of downforce,” so will have work to do in order to improve the car for Saudi Arabia in a fortnight’s time in terms of adding load to both the front and rear ends of the car.
Russell meanwhile finished seventh after he was jumped by Lance Stroll out of his final pit stop on Lap 32 but like Hamilton, is in agreement that Mercedes are “lacking downforce” but “performance” too within his own car.
The one-time race winner also acknowledged Aston Martin, as the “surprise package” of this season, whilst accepting that Mercedes has “too big” a “deficit” to Red Bull to be able to recover quickly.
Russell however believes that the biggest positive to take into the next race “is that there is no fundamental problem with the car,” compared to last season where they faced a season-long battle to at least salvage one win which came in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Reflecting on how easy the solution will be to find compared to 12 months ago, Russell added: “As silly as it sounds, that is one of the easiest problems to solve compared to what we had to do last year.
“We are all here to win. If we must sacrifice some races or part of this season to give ourselves a chance to fight in the second half of the season, or even next year, that is what we are going to have to do.
“We know the Team is good at developing and finding performance, but we are a long way behind where we want to be. We need to find some performance quickly.”
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