Lewis Hamilton publicly asked George Russell for help to beat their rivals in Sunday’s Spanish Grand Prix.
That was after a flashpoint between them on track during the final part of qualifying in Barcelona. Russell was not happy with what Hamilton was doing on track and made his frustration clear in a message over the radio.
The 26-year-old fumed: “What the f*** was Lewis doing, prepping that lap?” Russell’s race engineer wanted his driver to refocus and simply replied: “We’ll talk about it afterwards, head in the game.”
That advice was taken and Russell managed to steer his Mercedes to fourth on the grid. But he was out-qualified by Hamilton for just the second time this year as the seven-time F1 champion went third quickest.
They will have pole-sitter Lando Norris and championship leader Max Verstappen ahead of them on the grid. And, in order to catch the McLaren and Red Bull cars, Hamilton feels he and Russell would benefit from working together as best as they can.
The 39-year-old said: “Position is everything, so I think… also, there is two of us, so hopefully we can apply pressure as a team to both of the cars ahead in order to play out something in strategy and slowly climb up. It’s all about degradation tomorrow and how you look after the tyres, so we won’t know until we get into that first run.”
Hamilton was delighted with his best qualifying result of the season so far, and that his team had provided more evidence that they are now capable of challenging the top teams. He beamed: “This is another encouraging result for us as a team. Everyone has been working so hard to bring updates and improvements to the car, making incremental gains and small steps over the season so far.
“We are starting to become more consistent too and that is huge for us. That is down to every member of the team putting in the extra hours and I want to say a big thank you to them. The car is getting more enjoyable to drive. Today, the gap was three-tenths, but I think in reality it was less as we didn’t get everything out of the car on that last lap.
“I am going into tomorrow focused on trying to fight for the win. We are in a good starting spot with that long run down to turn one. Degradation will also play a key role tomorrow and I think our long runs in practice looked strong in that respect. I hope that translates into Sunday and we can have a good afternoon.”
Russell, meanwhile, felt there was more on the table and said: “A second-row lock-out is a decent result but the gap to Norris and Verstappen was slightly bigger than we expected. Both mine and Lewis set good laps, but I don’t think either of us felt that we maximised them. Getting the tyres perfectly in the window around a challenging track like this is so difficult. I think those ahead managed to do that and maybe we didn’t today.”
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