Lewis Hamilton said it was tricky to get temperature in the Pirelli tyres due to cool track temperatures on the morning of Formula 1‘s second day of winter testing.
The Mercedes AMG Petronas Motorsport driver ended the day tenth fastest out of 12 runners at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, despite completing the most amount of laps of anyone in the morning session with 74, before handing over to team-mate Valtteri Bottas in the afternoon.
For the second day in succession Scuderia Ferrari Mission Winnow ended the day on top, with Charles Leclerc ending the morning session a second clear of his closest competitor, on the same C3 tyres as Hamilton.
Hamilton’s best time of a 1 minute 19.928 seconds stood nearly 1.9s short of Leclerc’s efforts, but the Brit maintained that he was happy with the programme and acknowledged that other drivers found the colder conditions difficult.
“It was quite cold in the morning, so switching the tyres on was a little bit tricky,” said Hamilton. “But it seemed like a few people had similar issues.
“We were focusing on working through our run plan and we got through everything we wanted.
“It’s been a good day overall.”
Just as Bottas had done on Monday morning, Hamilton spent his track time gathering aerodynamic data and focussing on reliability. Mercedes-Benz powered cars completed 1,127km of running over the course of Tuesday.
Hamilton added that Wednesday and Thursday will see more of the same from Mercedes, as it holds back from showing some more representative pace, in a quest to continue its understanding of the new W10. Bottas remarked on Monday that the team has already started to make changes to the car balance.
“We’re getting in a lot of mileage and we will try to increase that over the next days as we continue to discover the characteristics of this car,” he said.
“That’s the exciting part about it – learning something new and being faced with different challenges.
“Everyone is working so diligently, I’m really happy to be here with everyone for the seventh year in a row and I’m excited for this journey that we’re embarking on.”
