Victory for Hamilton: 'Had pace to challenge everyone'

Lewis Hamilton managed to finish the sprint race in second place. George Russell managed to recover during the sprint race: he drove from P11 to P8 after receiving a three-place grid penalty for impeding Charles Leclerc. Mercedes' technical director, Andrew Shovlin, stated that the German team goes into the main race with a good feeling.

"There's lots of encouragement we can take away from today, even if we could have walked away with a few more points if everything had gone our way. Lewis had good pace in the Sprint Shootout. We were 0.139s off the pole on Friday but 0.069s [during the Sprint Shootout]. That's a good sign that the update has moved us in the right direction," the technical director said.

Mercedes confident about the race

Today, Hamilton will start from P3, so there is a good chance of the Briton on the podium. Shovlin sees that too: "We've now got some good data to review overnight as part of our preparations for the race. The longer race opens up some strategy options, so hopefully, we'll be able to make progress with both drivers. Max was able to keep us at arm's length today, but it looked like we had the pace to challenge everyone else. Our stretch target for tomorrow, therefore, has to be a double podium."