Lewis Hamilton says Mercedes’ W15 F1 automobile is “higher in every single place” after serving to the workforce safe their greatest qualifying results of the season on the British Grand Prix, writes Lewis Larkam at Silverstone.
George Russell headed a British 1-2-3 in an exciting wet-dry qualifying at Silverstone as he beat seven-time world champion teammate Hamilton to pole place by 0.171s, with Lando Norris third for McLaren.
Mercedes have made notable progress with their troublesome W15 in latest weeks amid an aggressive improvement push, with a raft of upgrades being launched to their automobile.
When requested how totally different the W15 is in comparison with the beginning of the season, Hamilton mentioned: “Large distinction.
Pushed for particulars on the place the variations are, Hamilton replied: “All over the place. It is simply higher in every single place.
“From Bahrain, for instance, the automobile felt horrible, and the progress that we made by way of dialling and fine-tuning the automobile to optimise the aero package deal.
“This workforce has by no means struggled so as to add efficiency, however the place notably they put that efficiency has all the time been, with this technology of automobile, has been an enormous query and the place we’re getting the downforce from.
“They’ve completed an incredible job, the engineers again on the manufacturing unit. However, you already know, look, it is… We might undoubtedly take it at the moment, however these guys are nonetheless… Purple Bull, notably Max, and the McLarens are very, very, very quick.
“And in some methods, you already know, you noticed within the final race, they had been fairly a bit forward of us. So I am hoping that tomorrow, with the circumstances, we will maintain our personal.”
After claiming his second pole of the yr, every week after scoring Mercedes’ first win since 2022, Russell insisted the workforce have now discovered a “the completely satisfied medium” with their automobile.
“I feel we have made some small adjustments, which have had a huge impact,” he defined. “We knew from the beginning of this yr, the baseline of this automobile is considerably higher than what we have had in earlier years.
“However we went from having an oversteer automobile final yr, then to an understeer automobile this yr. And now we have simply dialled it again and located the completely satisfied medium.
“If you’ve obtained the steadiness in a great place, the tyre temperatures are in the correct window, and the lap time simply actually snowballs positively. It hasn’t been a considerable change, but it surely’s made a large distinction to the lap time.”