Mercedes prepares for a tough Sunday: 'Make up a lot of ground'

Mercedes is experiencing another poor weekend, this time in Imola. After a disappointing qualifying session, Lewis Hamilton and George Russell could manage no better than P11 and P14 in the sprint race. The team is therefore preparing for a tough Sunday.

During qualifying on Friday, Hamilton and Russell didn't get beyond Q2, and they couldn't make up many places during the sprint race either. In Mercedes' official press release, Andrew Shovlin explains why that was.

"We were hoping to move forward this afternoon but we've ended up back where we started with George and slipping back one place with Lewis. The starts were OK, the drivers both lacked a bit of grip on the first lap to attack but also got boxed in position with cars around them and the outside line through turn 2 to 4 was moving quicker. For the remainder of the race, both drivers were affected by being in a DRS train and just couldn't gain on the cars ahead."

'Preparing for a tough afternoon'

If Mercedes want to score points tomorrow, a lot will have to change, but in any case, Shovlin expects a tough Sunday for the team. In previous races, Mercedes was able to take advantage of reliability problems at the competition, but it remains to be seen whether that will happen again in Imola.

"We're going to have to prepare ourselves for a tough afternoon tomorrow. The longer race should allow the cars to spread out more which will help but we've got a lot of ground to make up if we want to get into a good points-scoring position," said the Mercedes engineer.