F1 News
Mercedes still have question marks: "Our long runs on Friday were average"
For Mercedes, it was an 11th front-row lockout in the 2020 F1 season. Lewis Hamilton on pole position, followed by Valtteri Bottas and Max Verstappen. Andrew Shovlin explains that the team is happy with the good performance, especially after the poor qualifying result in Turkey.
"A great result for the team and a seriously strong session by Lewis. He looked to have everything well under control from the first run, so congratulations to him. It's not completely straightforward, we've been battling a bit with the car balance and throughout free practice we were struggling to get everything in the right window," Shovlin said.
Question marks for Sunday
"However, in qualifying it came together nicely and we were able to find more and more time as the track gripped up. We're happy that we have both cars starting on the Medium tyre but we're expecting to see some differences in the strategy tomorrow as a number of teams have carried an extra hard tyre into their race allocation," he added.
Mercedes' strategic options are limited. "Our long runs on Friday were distinctly average so we've made quite a few changes coming into today and hopefully we can keep the tyre temperatures under control during the race. It's also a track where you can overtake, where degradation plays a big part in the strategy and where you can undercut from a long way back which should make for an exciting race," he concluded.