"It didn't feel terrible, but we're just too far away"- Lewis Hamilton on Mercedes' performance in practice at Belgian GP

Lewis Hamilton said that Mercedes were way behind the frontrunners after free practice at the Belgian GP on Friday. The Mercedes driver could not leave much of an impression in either practice session, with McLaren's Lando Norris producing better lap times.

Hamilton admitted that Mercedes were too far away from the front. When asked if he hoped the team could show overnight improvement, like in Hungary, the seven-time champion sounded sceptical.

“I want to assume the same thing – I wouldn’t say so, no, we are just not very quick," said Hamilton. "I don’t know why. “We are going out and giving it everything we’ve got. It could be tyres, tyre temps, wing level; it could be a multitude of things. It doesn’t feel terrible out there. We are just a long way off. But we often find this on the Friday, and then things change a bit more on Saturday. I hope that’s the case.”

About the possibility of taking new power unit parts, the Mercedes driver said that there's always a risk involved, but the team team does not want to take any penalties now. He said:

“Everyone’s at risk, but at the moment we are not taking any penalties. The car doesn’t feel the same as it did at the last track in qualifying kind of time, but Friday and Saturday morning, it felt kind of similar to this now. That gives me hope that we can turn it around.”

Meanwhile, Hamilton's teammate, George Russell, indicated that tyre temperature was something the team had struggled with in the past, and that could have flared up at Spa too.

"Tyre temperature is something we've struggled with this season, and I struggled quite a lot on every compound today," said Russell. "In these conditions, it's definitely something we need to work on. But we know that once you get temperatures in the right window, you can find a huge amount of performance, so there's a little optimism there. We're pretty used to having bad Fridays, so let's see if we can turn it around."

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Lewis Hamilton's teammate hoping for drier and warmer Saturday

George Russell said that there's no guarantee that the team can find the performance they showed in the last race. However, he hopes the conditions would be better on Saturday and the team is able to extract a better performance than they did on Friday.

He said:

"I don't think there's any guarantee we can find the performance that we had in the last race, but we'll be working flat out tonight to try and get on top of it. Totally different day tomorrow; conditions will be very different, hopefully warmer and drier, so let's see what it brings."

With both Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc starting at the back of the grid, it will be interesting to see how Hamilton and Russell approach the rest of the weekend.