Mercedes hint at better race performance: "Biased our tyre selection"

Disappointing day for Mercedes

The winners of the last eight Constructors World Championships had a bad start to the 2022 season by their standards. Hamilton qualified behind both drivers from Ferrari and Mercedes, with Russell getting beat by former Mercedes driver Valtteri Bottas after a mistake at turn one in Q3.

Trackside engineer Shovlin hinted that Mercedes have put an extra focus on tyre strategy in Sunday's race. He and the Mercedes team will be hoping this is a weapon that can combat the quicker Ferrari and Red Bull cars. 

"We were realistic with our expectations going into qualifying and anticipated a pretty difficult session, but considering the issues that we're having to manage on the car at the moment, we weren't as far off as we might have feared. We only had a single Soft in the final session as we've biased our tyre selection towards the race, for Lewis it might have meant he found another tenth or two but probably wouldn't have changed the order. For George, only having the one set in the final session was much more costly; the tyres weren't ready and he lost seven or eight tenths, a second down on his Q2 time," Shovlin said.

"We know we have to improve before thinking about fighting for the win so our focus is very much on damage limitation in the championships. We'll see where our race pace is tomorrow, there may be some opportunity for Lewis if either of the Red Bulls or Ferraris are struggling but he should be well placed to race all the cars lining up behind him. With George we have a bit of ground to make up but it's a track where that is possible."