Lewis Hamilton believes Mercedes will be more than ready to meet a Ferrari title challenge as the Italian team seek to build on Sebastian Vettel’s surprise victory in the Malaysian Grand Prix. The world champion trailed in 8.5 seconds behind the German at Sepang and admitted to being surprised at the speed with which Ferrari had eroded Mercedes’ dominance in Australia at the season’s opener.
Hamilton, who had won seven of the previous eight grands prix, said he expects Mercedes will face competition for the rest of the season. “I don’t think it’s a one-off,” he said of Ferrari’s victory. “I don’t think they were lucky or it was a fluke.
“It’s nice to see Ferrari back. I don’t think it was a wake-up call. I don’t think we were in need of a wake-up call – we won by 30 seconds in the last race. But I think everyone can always do, regardless if you’re winning, with … it’s not a kick, more like a pinch. This result has given us a pinch. We know now we’ve got a race on our hands. We’re a racing team. And we will be quicker in the next race. We’ve got a great group of people, a great approach, and from this we’ll take a step back and work very hard to analyse today.”
Hamilton appeared in a relaxed mood in the aftermath of Sunday’s race, despite his defeat by Vettel and a series of angry messages to his team during the race, when he was heard to say “this is the wrong tyre, man” and “don’t talk to me in a corner, I almost went off”.
His team-mate, Nico Rosberg, who finished third, also had a difficult time with messages to his team and the Mercedes team principal, Toto Wolff, admitted there had been problems. “We weren’t particularly good on radio messaging,” Wolff said. “We had a couple of weird calls. There was lots of action on the radio internally, something we need to look at. If you see you’re not able to catch up there is a certain frustration which grows in you.”
Hamilton, nonetheless, is looking ahead positively. He expects to announce that he has agreed a new contract with Mercedes in the next few days – “honestly, it’s 99.6% done” – with a substantial increase expected on his £20m salary, if not to the same level as Vettel and McLaren’s Fernando Alonso.
And while the British driver said his car had the wrong balance at Sepang after missing most of free practice on Friday, he is confident the team will learn from the experience. “It was damage-limitation. If this is a bad day and we can still get second and third then that’s good. We’ve had a good debrief and there’s lots of things we can learn with engineers, communication wise, and for myself, the balance. It was a testing weekend.”
Hamilton also admitted that when he sat next to Vettel in the post-race conference he thought about Alonso, who failed to finish Sunday’s race after starting from the back. “I sat next to Sebastian and thought to myself: ‘What is Fernando thinking?’ I remember when I left McLaren and came here, we were better the next year. I had a good feeling then, but he’s almost done the opposite of what I did. It could have been him today. It’s just strange how things turn out.”
Wolff denied the team’s tyre strategy was to blame for the result although he said Mercedes had made mistakes in their race preparations. “Ferrari won the race,” he said. “It wouldn’t be right to say that we lost it. We were pretty sure the three-stop strategy would work for us and I believe that couldn’t have matched the long-run pace of Ferrari. We were probably a bit too aggressive on setups, which pushed us into a direction of a three stop.”
He, too, admitted he had been surprised by Ferrari but unlike Hamilton, did feel able to describe the result as a wake-up call. “We didn’t expect them to catch us this quickly,” he said. “We were pretty dominant in Melbourne. That we’ve been caught up by a Ferrari in two weeks, that they beat us fair and square on the track, is a bit of a surprise, but equally a bit of a wake-up call, which is good for us. We were not in control. We had new information which was different to what we had assessed over the weekend. Things didn’t pan out in the way we expected them to pan out.”
