© Steve Etherington for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.
Lewis Hamilton says he “really enjoyed driving” the upgraded W14, and added he is “not going to say where” he saw the biggest improvement.
In Monaco, Mercedes finally introduced its big upgrade package for the W14, and although free practice timesheets did not show a huge improvement, Lewis Hamilton was very positive after the sessions.
“I’ve generally had an amazing day, I really enjoyed driving today,” the Briton told told Sky Sports after FP2.
“I want to say a big, big thank you to everyone back at the factory. To build and design and develop a car is not an easy thing.
“And everyone’s put so much time in, so many hours of hard work to have us here today. I’m glad that we were able to keep it on track for them and I think we got a lot of data.”
When asked if he felt a clear improvement with the car, the Briton said:
“It’s not the place to ultimately test and upgrade, but the car was generally feeling good.
“I think ultimately, it was a bit of a shame we weren’t as close as I’d hoped at the end of the session, but I definitely felt the improvements.
“We’ve just got to keep chipping away at it and see if we can squeeze any more juice out of the car.”
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He was then asked if there was a specific area where he felt the most improvement.
“There is, I’m not going to say where, but there is. It’s very clear where the lack of performance is for me. We’ll talk about that in the debrief.
“We’ll put our heads together and try and figure out how we can do that with within what we have. And hopefully this gives us a platform to build on moving forwards.
“I thought, well, maybe we’re looking pretty good [in FP1], but we’re always looking pretty good [in FP1] for some reason.”
As for Mercedes’ chances this weekend, Lewis says it’s not likely that they will be able to battle the Red Bulls.
“In this session, we were close to half a second off. I think maybe that could have been three tenths. But I don’t think we have half a second in the bag. So, we’ll see.
“We’ll work on it and see if we can squeeze some more [performance] tonight,” Hamilton concluded.
