Hamilton: Mercedes F1 car ‘feeling at its worst’ in Hungary practice

Hamilton ended second practice at the Hungarian Grand Prix 16th fastest, while teammate George Russell was slowest overall.

The timesheets were skewed by the fact that some teams only ran on one set of tyres in preparation for the experimental qualifying format on Saturday.

However, despite this fact, Hamilton wasn’t impressed with how the W14 was feeling at the Hungaroring.

“No, it wasn’t feeling good at all,” he said. “It was feeling like the car at its worst today. We will work on the setup tonight. Last year it felt terrible at the beginning but we turned it around with some setup changes. 

“We will work on it tonight and hopefully tomorrow it will feel better.”

Russell seemed to have a more positive outlook on Mercedes’ chances, citing their tyre usage as the main factor for their struggles in practice.

He also mentioned the fact that Mercedes typically start weekends poorly but improve later on.

“It didn’t feel too bad in all honesty,” he added. “It was obviously on very different programmes to everybody else. We only used one set of tyres throughout - it was a set of used tyres from FP1. The lap times don’t really give a true representation and I am sure we will be better. 

“We’re just focused on trying to improve. We always know we tend to get better as the weekend progresses which is the right way round to be. =

“A few interesting things we learned even in that one session. Let’s see what we can do tonight.”