Mercedes: It looked like we had a race car that could fight for a podium'

Sometimes the result of a sports match does not reflect the actual balance of power. Mercedes knows all about it, as they could see this Friday. According to the team, the result of free practice did not do full justice to where Mercedes stands in the F1 field.

Indeed, Andrew Shovlin (Trackside Engineering Director) agreed: Mercedes has a car that will struggle to reach the top ten in qualifying. But: "Today, it looked like we had a race car that could fight for a podium," said Shovlin. At the same time, he admitted that the speed over one lap is not good enough.

"Clearly, we've got lots of work to do to understand why that is. We've got some investigations ongoing, but we'd like to check through more data to test our theories; we've also got Mick [Schumacher] in the simulator overnight, which will be a big help."

According to Shovlin, the good news for Mercedes was that with little fuel on board, things went well on mediums and hard tyres. "It was also encouraging that our updates seem to be behaving as expected. The list of things to fix is, therefore, not long, but it's a very important one with regard to qualifying tomorrow. There is plenty of work ahead, but we've got lots of ideas, and hopefully, we'll make good progress."