Monaco GP: Busy Friday for the Team in the Principality

The eighth race of the season takes the team to the historic Circuit de Monaco. For the 81st time, the Monaco Grand Prix will be held in the principality on the Côte d'Azur. As all the other nine teams, we have brought another set of upgrades to the track, including a Monaco-specific rear wing, changes to the floor and a new front wing for evaluation. On Friday, our Mercedes duo set the right tone for an encouraging weekend.

P1 was briefly interrupted by a red flag, and FP2 seemed destined to be compromised by rain (which then never came). As every practice lap counts in the principality, George and Lewis had no time to lose in the second practice session. The Mercedes headed out on new Medium tyres immediately after the green light. Early in the session, it became clear that the team is particularly fast in the first sector. With consecutive laps on the Medium tyre, the drivers continued to build up their confidence.

As the session progressed, Lewis steadily improved his lap times and got closer and closer to Leclerc's best time, while George struggled on the bumpy track with steering vibrations under braking. He returned to the pits for a quick check and work on the car to reduce the problem.

Halfway through FP2, George and Lewis headed back out. All 20 drivers had their moments on the difficult circuit. Including our duo, but both were able to avoid any damage. Lewis' fastest lap was just 0.188 seconds slower than Leclercs and put him P2 while running used Soft tyres. George still struggled with vibrations, so P10 was the maximum for him.

In the final part of practice, the Mercedes duo focused on long runs with Medium tyres. There is still work to do, but overall, it was an encouraging session for the team, and with 62 laps in total, the team gathered a lot of data to analyze overnight.

Lewis Hamilton

It’s been a good day, probably the best we’ve had so far this year, and the car is feeling very positive. This track is just amazing in an F1 car, and I’ve been enjoying my driving today – I was pleasantly surprised by the grip level and the way the car was responding, which made it a much more enjoyable ride than the last two years. In the second session, it felt a bit less comfortable, and we’ve got lots of work to do overnight to improve the long runs and the front graining. It was a feeling positive on the lower fuel, and we don’t want to lose that, but our focus now is to improve on the long run.

Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director

Overall, we've had a pretty good day with both cars. FP1 was productive. We pulled forward the FP2 soft into that session as we expected rain although that never materialised and meant we were on used tyres for the low fuel soft in the afternoon. George was struggling with a vibration on braking – we need to get on top of that for tomorrow as it appeared to get worse during the course of the day and was very intrusive this afternoon. However, the underlying pace of the car seems good. Our long run needs some work as we've got to be a bit kinder on the front tyres on Sunday but we've got some options for that. We've also got to track the circuit as the grip comes up but it's encouraging that we seem to have a decent platform to work from.