Lewis Hamilton asked his team to leave after the first lap, when he was last, to save kilometers to the engine of your Mercedes in extreme hot conditions. His team reminded him that they could fight for points, in fact he finished the race fifth, not far off the podium of his teammate George Russell. The Englishman, after getting out of the car: “I’m very happy, I would have preferred a calmer race because I was thirty seconds from penultimate and I remembered Yeda, when I couldn’t get to the top-10, I thought it was impossible to get to the points. The team told me that I could be eighth, I didn’t understand it, they were quite optimistic, but I decided to give it my all. It was a pity that in the end we had to take care of the engine.”
“It’s not that I felt defeated, it’s that I was thirty seconds behind the next car. Reliability can be an issue later on. But never give up. A race like this tastes better than many victories when you come from so far back, “she clarified about his radio message. Now he feels capable of winning again in 2022:” It is clear. We will see in the next race, but I have no doubt that we are going in the right direction. I could have been with the Red Bulls without the incident.” Mercedes completed its best race of the year for pure performance.
Russell: “We have turned a page”
Across the garage Russell scored his second podium of the season after Australia and is fourth in the championship standings. The young Englishman also had a nice fight against Verstappen: “It’s fantastic to be on the podium and it shows the hard work of the factories. On days like this, it was very hard for the drivers. We are making progress, as a team we have turned the page. There is more performance to find, now we have solved the problem (of porpoising) and we can focus on bringing more performance. We are down six races.”