Lewis Hamilton had a great start to the new Formula 1 season. The seven-time world champion was the fastest on the first day of free practice for the Bahrain GP, leading a Mercedes one-two with a 0.206s advantage over teammate George Russell. Both set their times in the second session, the only one representative of qualifying and race conditions.
The day started off difficult for Hamilton, as he admitted himself, quoted by the official championship website: ‘In FP1 we were surprised. It was very windy this morning, so it was a really difficult session, I think for everyone. The track was so different compared to last week’s testing. Other than that, the feeling was good, but we really didn’t know where we stood with the C2 tire, and then in this session [FP2] we made some improvements with the car throughout the session.’
For Hamilton, the outcome was surprising, as he admitted: ‘I don’t understand, it’s a shock to see where we are. We’ll accept it for now, but we can’t get ahead of ourselves. We need to keep our heads down, keep working on the setup. I think our long-run pace is nowhere near that of Red Bull, for example, and I think we were much closer, so we have some work to do here.’
