This week, Lewis Hamilton will back to the circuit for his first F1 practise sessions since losing to Max Verstappen in Abu Dhabi.
As he approaches to race Mercedes’ new W13 in Barcelona, Lewis Hamilton confessed that he has “no idea what to expect.”
F1 cars will back to the circuit on Wednesday morning for the first of six sessions stretched over three days at Circuit de Catalunya.
F1 will consider following month’s trip to Bahrain as their official pre-season testing session, therefore the sessions will not be shown on television and no live timings will be offered for fans.
For the first time after December’s championship duel, Hamilton will be in the presence of Red Bull driver Max Verstappen during the Barcelona test. Verstappen completed a contentious last-lap pass to snare what would have been Hamilton’s 8th world championship.
The two sport’s biggest stars challenged themselves to new levels in 2021, and now they must go even higher as they ready for what promises to be another thrilling Formula One season.
“If you think what you saw at the end of last year was my best, wait until you see this year,” Hamilton optimistically stated.
Despite spending hours on the Mercedes simulator at Brackley, he confessed that he still had no idea how his team’s W13 will race on the track.
“I have no idea what to expect when we get to get on track,” he said. “I hope that the simulator is accurate. If not, we’ll make corrections and push forward.
“This is actually the most exciting part of of the year for me, I would say, at least up until this point. When you see all of these engineers, all the men and women that have been working so hard, you see the smiles on their faces and the excitement, because all this work that we’ve been doing for months and months…
“The pieces are now built and they’ve been put together, and then you get to see the car delivered and then there’s two of us who get to go out and drive. It’s a special experience to go through with everyone.”
F1’s 2022 cars are unlike anything Hamilton has driven before
Although Hamilton has only raced the new Mercedes W13 on a shooting day, he claims that getting behind the wheel of the latest silver arrow is a distinctly new sensation.
His squad will have 3 days in Barcelona to test their car before the upcoming test in Bahrain next month, and their top driver has cautioned that setting up the new engine would not be simple.
Toto Wolff has already attempted to downplay Mercedes’ prospects of making it nine Constructors’ Championship victories in a row in 2022, praising rivals Ferrari and even speculating that a Brawn-style upset could occur this season.
Ferrari was able to focus entirely on obtaining a head start for 2022 by polishing their new F1-75 in the wind tunnel at Maranello while out of championship contention in 2021.
Ferrari had plenty of runs after falling to sixth in the 2020 standings, owing to F1’s sliding scale for aerodynamic testing, which shows the worst-performing teams additional wind tunnel time.
With only three days of testing in Barcelona and three in Bahrain, Hamilton understands the significance of getting right to work.
“It’s going to require a lot of finesse and a lot of work to find how to set it up, with new, different tools that we have,” he added.
“The car is so different; it’s so different to any other car that I’ve driven in the past, in terms of the aero balance and how it shifts mechanical balance… it’s a very different machine to drive.”
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