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Hamilton: Honda are “very, very close” to Ferrari and Mercedes

15:33, 29 Mar 2019

byBevan Youl

Lewis Hamilton believes the Honda power unit used by Red Bull is ‘very, very close’ to that of the engines of Mercedes and Ferrari.

Max Verstappen put his Honda-powered Red Bull on the podium two weeks ago in Melbourne, in front of the Ferrari’s of Sebastian Vettel and Charles Leclerc.

Most notably though was the pass Verstappen did on Vettel at the end of the straight to show the power of the Honda engine.

Hamilton said (quoted by PlanetF1.com): “Without doubt, the Red Bulls have a much better power unit this year.

“I think their engine performance is very, very close.

“I believe it’s within 10bhp or something of the top cars.

“If you look at their GPS speed on the straights, they’re pretty much just as quick as us.

“That’s a great start for them and I really hope the reliability’s strong for them so they can be really in the fight.”

Mercedes had seemed to lack the pace that Ferrari had during testing in Barcelona but ended up dominating in Melbourne with Valtteri Bottas finishing 20 seconds ahead of Hamilton who finished just 2 seconds ahead of the Red Bull, but a massive 30+ than the Ferrari’s.

The Brit believes this was down to good luck on the day with the cars.

“We’re still learning about it. As we mentioned in testing it really wasn’t great to start off with,” Hamilton added.

“But we found a window in which it works a lot better.

“We were very, very fortunate to come across that. If we hadn’t discovered that in testing, we probably wouldn’t have had the same results we did in the first race.
“That was really hard work from everyone collectively. It is a better car but it’s not perfect, there are still areas we are working on. But it’s a really great platform for us moving forward.

“We do understand the car a lot better particularly from testing, the positive two days, and obviously the race weekend. Now we’re moving in a really positive direction.”