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Promising Start For Mercedes In German Free Practice

Promising start to the weekend for Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport on Friday practice.

Promising start to the weekend for Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport on Friday practice.

• In the morning session, Lewis came home in P2 with Valtteri in P5
• Lewis finished the afternoon session in P2 with Valtteri in P3
• Today's programme focused on tyre performance and wear rate as well as start performance

Lewis Hamilton
It's great here in Hockenheim - the weather is amazing, it's very hot, which makes it very demanding and physical in the car. It's quite a technical track even though it is a pretty short circuit. We've got through our programme today, finished all the sessions and got all the information we needed from the tyres. The car was feeling good, but it is very close, so there's lots of work to do tonight. We've been working on our starts, making sure to get a better understanding of the tyres and tyre temperatures and trying to be as perfect as we can in that area. Both Ferrari and Red Bull were very quick today and I think it will be very similar tomorrow and on Sunday. It's going to be a serious challenge and it's not an easy track to get right, so we will have to give it everything.
 
Valtteri Bottas
We announced my new contract today and I got to drive a Formula One car around Hockenheim - so it's been a really good day and it's great to be back in Germany. I think we're now in a very good situation as a team, because the contract situation is clear and we can focus totally on the tough battle we're in. The car seemed competitive today but, as expected, it is very close. I was struggling a bit with the front end of the car; we need to find a bit more bite in the slow and medium speed corners, but otherwise it was okay. I'm not completely satisfied yet but that's exactly what Fridays are for. We will work on the car and surely make another step forward for tomorrow. We suffered a bit from overheating our tyres today and I'm sure the others did as well, but it looks like it will be a bit cooler on Sunday. We've got a lot of data to go through tonight to gain a better understanding of the tyres when we get to the race.
 
Andrew Shovlin
We've had a pretty good day overall but it's always difficult to know quite where we stand on a Friday. The car balance has been ok from the start and on a single lap we look to be fairly competitive. We have seen good times from both Ferrari and Red Bull so we expect it to be tight tomorrow in qualifying but there are a few areas where we can find a bit of pace. In the afternoon our programme was split between the cars to allow us to collect data on all three compounds. The hot conditions are definitely making life difficult for the tyres, the UltraSoft is really on the limit, it's got good grip to start but needs to be driven ever so gently to keep it from blistering. The Soft and Medium are a bit easier to lean on which may mean that we see a range of strategies on Sunday which should lead to an interesting race. We expect the weather to cool a bit going into tomorrow which will make working conditions more pleasant and will help the tyres a little bit. There's also a risk of rain for qualifying which could shake things up if it comes.

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