Mercedes’ rivals were surprised by the speed of their car in yesterday’s Spanish Grand Prix as the team scored its best result of the season so far.
Lewis Hamilton rose from fourth on the grid to finish second while George Russell completed the team’s first double podium finish of the season having started 12th.
Lance Stroll said he thought his Aston Martin would be the second-quickest car behind the dominant Red Bulls and was surprised how easily Hamilton passed him early in the race.
“They had a rocket ship today,” Stroll told media including RaceFans at the Circuit de Catalunya. “I’m not really sure where they found that pace.
“I was expecting us to be the strongest car after Red Bull, I expected after all the races this year to have pace to do something good today, we just didn’t have it.”
Hamilton also overhauled Carlos Sainz Jnr as he moved his way forward. The Ferrari driver said “the biggest surprise is how close were Mercedes [to Red Bull] in this race.”
Sainz said Mercedes appeared to have become the closest threat to Red Bull. “I think our pace, when you look like we finished 45 seconds [behind], it’s more or less where we finished in Miami, where we’ve finished in recent races.
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“It’s just Merc has suddenly slotted in between us and Red Bull, probably where Aston should have been but I don’t know what happened to Aston today.”
While Red Bull and Mercedes occupied the top four places, the Aston Martin pair came sixth and seventh behind Sainz – their worst result so far this year. However team principal Mike Krack is wary of drawing hasty conclusions over Mercedes’ performance.
“I think that would be too early or too easy to say because we have not seen the full picture,” said Krack. “It’s something that like in the beginning of the year we said we need two or three races to see where you are really, I think it’s the same. Now it could well be that others have made a bigger step, but our initial analysis so far doesn’t reflect that.”
However he admitted that even if the team hadn’t under-performed in qualifying they likely wouldn’t have been quick enough to beat the Mercedes drivers.
“If we had started second, still it would have been hard to keep the Mercedes behind in this initial phase of the race, the first 15 laps, because I think at times we were five to six or seven tenths slower. And this is something that we need to understand.”
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