Hamilton warns: I don’t think we will be able to compete with Red Bull. The British driver has spoken out about his team’s form

The Albert Park circuit in Melbourne, Australia, is the venue for the Formula 1 and lower categories race weekend. Drivers and teams have completed both Friday practice sessions, with conditions being very different each time. Lewis Hamilton, for example, complained about this, as the Mercedes drivers recorded completely different results.

The first practice session of the race weekend at the iconic Albert Park circuit was still in dry conditions. The fastest man in FP1 (Free Practice) was Max Verstappen, who set a time of 1:18.790.

Lewis Hamilton was right behind him, but lost over four tenths of a second. His teammate George Russell finished ninth.

As for the second practice session, it started again on a dry track. However, as the rain began to fall at Albert Park, the drivers had to contend with a wet track. As a result, the times were not representative.

Nevertheless, Fernando Alonso won FP2 with a time of 1:18.887, with Russell finishing fourth, almost eight tenths of a second behind. Hamilton completed 17 laps in FP2, finishing as high as thirteenth.

“It was good in the morning, but not so good in the afternoon. I felt a bit better in the morning, we made some changes but they didn’t work. Then it rained, so it wasn’t the best practice from that point of view,” Hamilton said after Friday’s session.

The conditions simply didn’t play into the hands of the drivers, resulting in what is known as traffic, or too many cars on the track in one particular spot.

I don’t think we’ll be able to compete with the Red Bulls

The downside of such situations is that the drivers then have to abort their fast lap because of it, for example, or they don’t collect as much race data as they need to as a result of this and the subsequent rain. Hamilton then went on to share his feelings regarding his predictions for the future course of the race weekend.

“I don’t think we will be able to compete with the Red Bulls. It’s just a matter of seeing if we can get as high as possible. But we have the pace to get into fifth place, just like we did in the last race,” Hamilton added.

Drivers and teams will complete the third practice session in Australia at the same time as the first one started. That’s at 3.30am our time. Qualifying is then scheduled for 07:00, the same time as Sunday’s race.

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