Hamilton feeling very positive after topping practice

Mercedes had been tipped to be up to 0.3seconds down on Ferrari after testing however Hamilton was consistently quick on the first day of the Australian Grand Prix weekend, with Sebastian Vettel and Charles Leclerc finishing FP2 in fifth and ninth places respectively.

Despite finishing first in both sessions, Hamilton believes there is more to come from the W10 ahead of a probable Ferrari resurgence on Saturday.

"I have a positive buzz from driving the car today. This is what I love doing," he told media after second practice.

“The car feels like it’s in a similar place to where it was in Barcelona, which is positive coming to a different track. We got through our programme really well, there were no issues on track.

“There’s plenty of stuff that we can improve on, but this was not a bad start. What we have to do now is really study and analyse everything, as we always do on a Friday night.

"But the fact is we’ve got two cars that continue to go around, none of us made a mistake and we kept the cars in one piece. That counts for a lot.”

Not only did Mercedes have the edge over one lap, race pace from both Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas showed promise compared to their rivals, although the Finn said he was expecting others to bounce back.

“We didn’t bring a lot of new parts to the car, but we were able to optimise the package that we have.

“We haven’t seen the full performance from any of the other teams. We have an idea of how much we can improve for qualifying, but we have no idea how much performance the other teams can still bring.”