2019 Australian Grand Prix – Friday

Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport start the season with a trouble-free Friday

• Lewis finished the first session of the year in P1 with Valtteri in P5
• In the afternoon session, Lewis topped the time sheets again with Valtteri in P2
• The team worked on the set-up and balance of the car today

Lewis Hamilton

It’s really nice to get back out on track. The weather is fantastic, we’ve already got quite a big crowd. I have a positive buzz from driving the car today – this is what I love doing. The car feels like it’s in a similar place to where it was in Barcelona, which is positive coming to a different track. We got through our programme really well, there were no issues on track. There’s plenty of stuff that we can improve on, but this was not a bad start. What we have to do now is really study and analyse everything, as we always do on a Friday night. But the fact is we’v e got two cars that continue to go around, none of us made a mistake and we kept the cars in one piece – that counts for a lot.

Valtteri Bottas

It’s nice to be back in a race car, doing the thing we love to do – I had fun today. The car felt better than it did in testing. We didn’t bring a lot of new parts to the car, but we were able to optimise the package that we have. It was a solid day for the first day back in the office, but the times are not important on a Friday. We haven’t seen the full performance from any of the other teams. We have an idea of how much we can improve for qualifying, but we have no idea how much performance the other teams can still bring. It will be interesting to see what the first competitive session holds tomorrow.

James Allison

It was a pretty productive day today, we achieved a decent balance with both drivers on both tyres. We also ran some new bits and they seem to work okay. It’s way too early in the weekend to have any sort of real idea of where we stand on pace, but what we do know is that the car seems to be handling reasonably well and it seems to have good tyre degradation on both compounds that we ran which is a good sign for tomorrow, but we will only get a clear picture of where we stand later in the weekend.