2022 F1 World Championship

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"Well, I was quite surprised to be fighting with Lewis for a couple of laps," said Gasly with a chuckle, "but it was entertaining. It was interesting also to follow and just to get some data and feeling following other cars. So I think it’s clearly better than last year, which makes me quite optimistic in terms of racing for the season.

"It was better, clearly. We kind of overtook each other a couple of times, stayed close to each other – and it was definitely an improvement, so I think racing should be quite fun this year," he added.

"I mean, we know on our side we have quite a lot of work to do to improve the performance, to improve the car balance. But clearly I could see Lewis was struggling as well and I think they do have some work to be fighting at the top.

"I think the conclusion is that Mercedes probably don’t look as good as they were in the past.

"But it’s only testing, it’s part of the test, and exploring how to get the best out of the car. But yes, in terms of racing it was clearly an interesting few laps, quite fun battles, and I think it should make all the races quite exciting for you guys this season."

Update from the team on @DanielRicciardo. ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/rDqeYRlf6P

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“I don’t expect we’ve made a huge amount of progress.

“The car naturally was fresher coming into the test: you have a new engine, you have new components. But it’s still car from last week. We obviously have learned a lot from the week of testing here and I hope we've taken some sort of step forward in terms of understanding where we position the car.

“I'm hoping my guys have come up with some sort of solution going into this weekend and when I get in the car today it feels better,” Hamilton added. “But I know there [won’t be] a huge change in such a short space of time. So we'll still most likely have some of the problems that we had last week.”

“I think they'll be dead last, according to their comments – I think they have an awful car, and they've had that already since 2017 in pre-season testing,” he deadpanned. “No, we'll find out. But they for sure will be competitive.”

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“It’s all about lap time, and we’re certainly not where we want to be,” he said. “I think we’ve made a bit of progress solving some issues, but the pace just is not there at all at the moment so we need to really go over the data tonight to understand why we’re both struggling a little bit with the car.

“And we’re a long way off the pace off Red Bull, Ferrari – even the likes of AlphaTauri, Alfa Romeo are seemingly on our pace or even quicker. So, we’ve got a bit of work to do.”

“We are truly throwing everything at [the car] at the moment to try and unlock the potential, which we think is there, but we’re just really struggling to tap into that at the moment. And everything we try is maybe one step forwards, two steps back, and there’s always a bit of a limitation – so it’s going to take time.

“I think we hoped that we could’ve solved it for this weekend, but how things stand for the moment, we aren’t in the fight and we’ve got some work to do,”

“We’re faced with much, much bigger problems this year,” said the seven-time champion. “And everything we do to try and fix it doesn’t really change that. It appears that it’s probably going to be a more longer term fix, so yes, nothing in the short term.”

“The braking thing is something we can fix… it’s just more the balance and this bouncing that we have and the loss of downforce that we generally do seem to have compared to others – this is making it much, much harder out there.

“And as you can see, we’re not bluffing like before, like people assume we were. It is what it is, we’ll work as hard as we can through it and do what we can.”

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“Red Bull are a long, long way ahead. It’s in the region of eight to ninth-tenths ahead of us and Ferrari is probably something like half a second, six-tenths ahead of us. So we’re fighting and scrapping with whoever is behind them.”