Lewis Hamilton said Ferrari has had a better start to F1 testing than last year, as he praised his Italian team for the “amazing” mileage hit on Thursday.
Hamilton got his first dry stint in Barcelona’s private preseason test on day four, with the seven-time world champion and teammate Charles Leclerc making the most of it with 172 laps combined.
Last year in Bahrain – Hamilton’s first test with Ferrari after a blockbuster move from Mercedes – both driver and team were plagued by unreliability.
“When you come to the test, you always want to get a lot of mileage, like today I did 85 laps in the morning, which is amazing,” Hamilton said. “And that’s really down to all the people at the factory who’ve done such a great job to make sure the car so far is really reliable. So, you know, last year we had a worse start to testing.
“So this is actually, considering it’s a completely new band of rules, it’s better than we’ve experienced in the past. So I’m really hopeful that continues.”
Ferrari also displayed encouraging pace on Thursday, although Mercedes already appear the team to beat.
Sources confirmed to ESPN that George Russell set a fastest lap of 1:16.445 on Thursday, which was 0.636 seconds faster than Kimi Antonelli’s morning benchmark and 1.778 seconds faster than the Ferrari of Leclerc, which was third fastest overall.
