Hamilton pleased by Mercedes’ performance after switching back to old floor · RaceFans

Lewis Hamilton said Mercedes had “a really good day” in practice after the team abandoned its latest floor upgrade.

The team won three out of four rounds before racing its new floor for the first time at the Dutch Grand Prix. But amid uncertainty over its effect on the car’s handling, Mercedes took the decision not to use it in Baku this weekend.

Hamilton ended both practice sessions inside the top three and was within a tenth of a second of the day’s fastest time, set by Charles Leclerc.

“I enjoyed today,” he told the official F1 channel afterwards. “We hit the ground running from the get-go.

“We made incremental steps with the set-up, for once. It felt like we didn’t have any steps that we had to come back on, [it] was, like, consistently building.

“I don’t know how my long run [pace] is compared to others, but we didn’t get a huge amount of laps. I think Red Bull seem pretty quick, as does the Ferrari, but we’re there or thereabouts.”

However Hamilton was reluctant to credit the team’s performance to the decision not to run the latest floor.

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“It’s really difficult to say what the car would have felt like with the other floor here,” he said. “It’s hard to feel a lot of difference between the two. But I’m not unhappy with the one we have.”

Mercedes have shown good performance on Fridays only to fall back on Saturdays several times this year. Hamilton is therefore keeping his expectations in check.

“I think on this day you don’t know what fuel loads everyone’s on, and often when you get to [final practice] or particularly when you get to qualifying, everyone takes a step. And we haven’t so far, or we haven’t always.

“So I think we’ll just stay cautious and just try to do the best we can with what we have. I hope that we are closer to the front than it seems, maybe, but we’ll find out tomorrow.”