Mercedes got their first taste of victory this season in F1 in Austria last week, when George Russell took advantage of a late-race incident involving Lando Norris and Max Verstappen to take the chequered flag at the Austrian Grand Prix and take the lead. Can the Silver Arrows make it two wins in a row on home soil with a win at the British Grand Prix?
This may be a tall order given McLaren and Red Bull’s performances so far (more on that later), but the team got off to an “encouraging” start during Friday’s two practice sessions at the historic Silverstone Circuit.
Lewis Hamilton finished seventh in FP1 using a mix of hard and medium compounds, then moved up to sixth in the second session using a mix of all three compounds, including a run on the soft. Russell followed a similar programme, using a mix of hard and medium tyres in the first session to finish fifth, before using all three compounds to finish tenth in the second session.
“P1 was a strong session and the car felt great. FP2 was a bit of a difficult hour, but we need to figure out why,” Russell said in the team’s post-practice media report. “The wind was pretty strong, [tires] “We had rainfall at the right time so that may explain a lot of it. The weather could change over the weekend and there could be more rain so we’ll have to adapt.”
“The car felt good overall today. We’re still a little bit off the final pace of the leaders, but today was encouraging. I don’t think the times are a perfect indication of how fast we are, but we still know we’ve got work to do tonight,” Hamilton said. “So we’re just going to try and do everything we can to perform better and hopefully that will get us a little closer to the front-running cars.”
In terms of the standings after the first day, Russell said McLaren and Red Bull were slightly ahead of Mercedes, suggesting the Silver Arrows could be battling Ferrari this weekend.
“After today’s race, I can say that the competitive situation is similar to the last few races. McLaren and Max [Verstappen] “If you look ahead, it’s very close between us and Ferrari,” Russell added. “We’ll work hard all night to make sure we get a step further and then we’ll see what happens tomorrow.”
As has been discussed here and elsewhere, no team has performed better than Mercedes over the past three race weekends, with the Silver Arrows having amassed 100 points in that period, more than McLaren, Ferrari and, of course, Red Bull.
Can they extend that winning streak at Silverstone? It’s probably too early to tell, but the week has started brightly for the team.
