01 September 2023 , 18:23
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Lewis Hamilton admitted his team has "work to do" overnight if Mercedes are to make an impact on this weekend's Italian Grand Prix.
The Formula 1 action at Monza began on Friday with the first two practice sessions at the famous 'Temple of Speed'. George Russell was inside the top 10 in both hours of running, but Hamilton's results were less consistent.
The seven-time world champion went eighth quickest in FP1 but was way down in 17th in the second session of the day. He questioned whether he had a problem on the straights over the radio, to be told by his race engineer that he was "around 5kph slower" than team-mate Russell.
Hamilton was not too downbeat afterwards, but recognised that there was work to be done ahead of the competitive action. "The reliability was strong, and we got through the work that we needed to, checking off the different tests we had to do," he said.
"There's lots of learning from today, and we will have a bit of work tonight to try and improve for Saturday – as we always manage to do. I know that the team will do great work overnight to improve the set-up and car balance, so that we can be quicker tomorrow."
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Trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin echoed that message that it could be a long night for Mercedes staff to get the car purring. He said: "It's been a messy day, partly with red flags but also because we've not got the car in a good place at the moment.
"That means we have a bit of work to do overnight to get the setup in the right place for the rest of the weekend. Single lap and long run both need work if we want to be competitive. There's not much else to say – we just need to get on with the job of sorting the car out."
Russell's post-practice update, though, was much more upbeat. "It's great to be back in Monza and driving the car at these high speeds and with low downforce levels. The characteristics are very different to what we had last week in Zandvoort, and that's something that it's fun to adapt to," he said.
"The car was feeling reasonably good, but we have some improvements to make on the soft tyre. The high fuel pace was looking pretty strong, so the focus tomorrow will be on finding more speed for qualifying."