Lewis Hamilton says Mercedes ‘missing something’ after finishing 15th in practice

Lewis Hamilton believes something was wrong with his car over a single lap during Friday practice for this weekend’s British Grand Prix, but is confident his team will find a solution in time for qualifying.

Hamilton finished the second practice in 15th place and 1.2s off the pace of Max Verstappen’s fastest time after struggling for performance throughout Friday practice.

Over longer runs to simulate how the car will perform in Sunday’s race, Hamilton’s performance looked more promising, so he is hopeful there will be an obvious fix to improve his car performance in time for Saturday’s qualifying session.

“Car wise, we’re battling the same thing most of the time — it’s a tough car to drive,” Hamilton said. “No matter what we do to set-up, it continues to be a tough car to drive.

“On a single lap I didn’t feel any improvement between tyre compounds, which shows that something is wrong. We’re missing something.

“On the long run it didn’t seem to be too bad, so that’s a positive at least.”

Mercedes’ lack of performance on Friday was underlined by Hamilton’s teammate George Russell finishing the session 12th.

Hamilton said the team’s reserve driver, Mick Schumacher, will work on the car’s problems overnight in the Mercedes’ simulator to find an improvement on the setups the two drivers ran on Friday.

“Me and George were just talking and he’s one way, he’s over here with the set-up, I’m over here,” Hamilton explained. “He was like ‘I’m thinking of coming to where you are but your lap time is then slow’ and I’m like ‘I was thinking of coming to where you are’.

“But we’ll try and work on it tonight and Mick will do some work on the sim tonight. Hopefully we will come up with something for tomorrow.”