Upbeat Hamilton “really enjoying” Ferrari’s new car in test · F1 · RaceFans

Lewis Hamilton gave a positive verdict on his first two days of testing Ferrari’s new car for the upcoming season.

“I think it’s a bit early to say but I’m really enjoying the car,” he told media at the Bahrain International Circuit today.

He said he was “slowly bonding” with the car, following his first change of teams in 12 years. “Yesterday was a so-so day, it was okay. But we got through all of our run plan.

“We’re testing a bunch of things, so I’m not doing set-up changes or directing where I want the car to go. We’re just getting through the motions.

“Today was a bit more of getting to explore a bit of my interaction with my engineer. But so far I really enjoy driving this car.”

Hamilton ended today’s test second-fastest, three-hundredths of a second slower than Carlos Sainz Jnr – the driver he replaced at Ferrari, who now drives for Williams.

The former Mercedes driver says he is still adjusting to the different terminology Ferrari use to refer to some parts of their car.

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“The effect is slightly different and the names they have are different,” he said, “but ‘roll’ is still ‘roll’ and ‘anti-roll bar’ is still ‘anti-roll bar’.

“Some of the other parts of the geometry, there are different words for it. So I’ve got it on my computer and I’m studying it each day and night to make sure I understand when they talk about these different components.

“I’ve done 12 years in another place where we talked about the same thing all the time. So I was used to it, I knew exactly what they are meaning.

“But every time [Ferrari] mention [something] in a debrief I’m like: ‘What part is this? Okay, it’s this part.’ It’s part of the learning process and that’s what makes it exciting, because it’s all new. I’m loving that newness.”

Over the first two days of the test, Ferrari ran Hamilton in the first session and his team mate in Charles Leclerc the second. They will swap the running order for the final day, when Hamilton is due to complete a race and qualifying simulation.