Mercedes faster than Red Bull? 'Speed of the car is really encouraging'

"A superbly accomplished drive by Valtteri in the wet today, he had the race under control from start to finish and his fastest lap at the end shows just how much he had in reserve," Shovlin opened in a Mercedes press release. "The only awkward point of his race was giving up the lead to Charles [Leclerc] in order to cover Max [Verstappen] but that came back to him pretty quickly."

Tough day for Hamilton

Hamilton had a much tougher afternoon than his teammate at Istanbul Park. The Briton had to start from midfield after screwing new engine parts into his car. "Lewis had a busier afternoon - he'd made good progress considering there was no DRS to help and got himself up to fifth."

The key moment of his race was when he battled for fourth place with Sergio Perez. At that point, many teams and drivers chose to make a pit stop, but Hamilton stayed out. "At that stage, most cars were stopping but we decided to leave Lewis out for the chance of either running to the end or transitioning to the dry tyre. It started to become clear to us that it was never going to be right for the slicks and our strategy tools were showing that we'd get beaten by Perez and Leclerc anyway if we stayed out, so we took a fresh set of Inters to cut our losses."

Mercedes happy with speed

"We've extended our lead in the Constructor Standings and whilst we've lost a little ground in the Driver Championship, the car pace has been really encouraging here, both wet and dry. We're looking forward to Austin where hopefully we can continue our current run of good form," concluded Shovlin.