Hamilton to keep chipping away at Ferrari lead

Shahida Jacobs
Lewis Hamilton in Mercedes action

Lewis Hamilton in his Mercedes

Lewis Hamilton is confident Mercedes will be in the mix at the front of pack at Spa despite Ferrari’s dominant display during Friday’s sessions.

Sebastian Vettel topped the timesheets during FP1 ahead of his team-mate Charles Leclerc while it was the reverse in FP2 as the latter was fastest.

After being 1.399s off the pace of the fastest Ferrari in the morning, Hamilton edged closer later in the day as he was 0.892s adrift.

The five-time World Champion had a throttle sensor problem in FP1, but a change of pedal seemed to do the trick as he upped his game.

“Obviously not a great start for us in FP1, we had a problem with the throttle and I lost power,” the Mercedes driver said. “I was idling with the rpm trying to get it back.

“I managed to fix it with a couple of switch changes. When we went back out we had another problem, that was a bit of a mess. I had a few laps towards the end, but not anything spectacular.

“And then we made some changes, we changed because the set up was quite far off going into FP2. It was feeling a lot better but there’s still a lot of work to do.

“I don’t know about the gaps, Ferrari looks quite quick, they’re nearly a second quicker than us just in a straight line down to Turn 5.

“That’s quite impressive, but we’ll keep just chipping away at it. We’re clearly up in the mix, which is good.”

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