After Friday practice was all said and done there were a few raised eyebrows at the fact that Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes were more than six tenths of a second slower than the Ferrari of Sebastian Vettel.
With the raw pace we have seen from the Hamilton/Mercedes combination over the years, and even this season, it made many wonder if there was a little bit of sandbagging going on, even though there would be absolutely no reason for the Brackley based squad to do this.
When asked by Sky about the possibility of sandbagging, Lewis was quick to douse the flames….
“We never sandbag, there's no benefit to sandbagging ever - I think Ferrari have done it in the past, but there's zero benefit for us to do so, “ he said. “Today has generally been a tricky day so Ferrari is definitely the quickest, as they have been all year so far so we work hard this evening and tomorrow try and see if we can pick up some pace."
“We managed to complete everything that we needed to do on our runs, but in terms of the balance of the car, the Ferrari seemed very, very fast on the long runs, so we need to work out how we can improve our pace. But there's still everything to play for. The tyres feel very peaky, so it's easy to drop out of the window of performance. But when they're working they seem to be good.”
