Monaco GP: Progress on the Streets of the Principality

The team started Q2 with a used set of Soft tyres. After their first fast laps, Lewis was P8 and George P9. Both drivers returned to the pits to tackle the remaining two attempts with new Soft tyres. The fresh tyres put the Mercedes duo in P2 and P5. For the final attempt, the team made some changes to the front wing. There was no need for George to complete another lap while Lewis improved to P7. With his teammate in P6, both drivers made it into the top 10 without any major problems.

Our Mercedes duo were the first cars on track in Q1. There was the usual heavy traffic in Monaco, with 20 cars on the 3.337-kilometer track. George's first attempt on new Soft tyres was a good start. Lewis however, had problems in the third sector before he could get a good lap in. To protect against the high track evolution, both drivers headed out again with a second fresh set of Soft tyres. George set the fastest time in Q1, and Lewis at P3 was also safely through to Q2. As expected, the field was extremely tight, with just a gap of 0.1 seconds between the top five drivers.

Action continues on Sunday afternoon at 15:00 local time (14:00 BST), with the start of the Monaco Grand Prix.

Lewis Hamilton

The car has felt great this weekend from the get-go and we were competitive through Friday and this morning in practice. I’ve been pushing the limits everywhere and the qualifying laps felt good. But each time I go into qualifying, I struggle to keep making progress with the car and it feels like I lose performance relative to the cars around me. There was a bit of a difference with our cars in the high-speed corners, as George is running the new wing this weekend, but it is great to see the team pushing so hard to bring upgrades to the last race and this one, too. We have been much closer to the front here, and the car is feeling much better than it has in Monaco in previous years; we just have to keep on pushing and getting closer to the front through the year.

Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director

The team has put together a solid weekend so far and both drivers had good pace today. It's difficult to not be frustrated with 5th and 7th, especially when you look at how small some of the gaps are and how easily we might have found enough pace for both to be further up the grid today. It's always a tricky circuit and it wasn't straightforward getting the new tyres to the right temperature for the first lap. We can at least reassure ourselves that the work we are doing to improve our speed seems to be effective. George was running a new front wing here and that looks like a step in the right direction. We'll have that on both cars for the next race in Montreal. The race will be interesting tomorrow: the tyres were quite fragile on Friday but hopefully we've improved the car to look after them. It's difficult with our starting positions but the race here is rarely dull, and incidents often throw up a few surprises. We'll do our best to finish higher than we start!