Hamilton Eyes Monaco Improvement at BetLM

Hamilton Eyes Monaco Improvement

Lewis Hamil­ton believes McLaren can increase the pres­sure on Red Bull at next weekend’s Monaco Grand Prix.

Hav­ing fin­ished only half a sec­ond behind Red Bull’s race win­ner Sebas­t­ian Vet­tel in Barcelona, Hamil­ton said: We have some­thing good com­ing for Monaco.”

He con­tin­ued: “I didn’t expect to be that quick today, we were quicker than the Red Bulls except in the high-speed cor­ners, pretty much.

“It’s pos­i­tive going into Monaco, where the dri­ver can make a difference.”

Hamil­ton was clearly encour­aged at being able to hus­tle Vet­tel to the very end of the race in Spain.

“A few more laps and you might have seen a dif­fer­ent result,” said Hamil­ton, who is the only other man to win a race this season.

“It was very dif­fi­cult to bal­ance how many laps you had left and how much life you had left in the tyres, and push­ing behind him, he was in clean air and I was in rough air, and the car was slid­ing so much. Nonethe­less we did a great job.”

Jen­son But­ton, who recov­ered from what he him­self described as a “dis­as­trous” start to fin­ish third for McLaren, said tyre wear was likely to be a huge fac­tor around Monte Carlo’s nar­row street circuit.

“I don’t think you are going to be hav­ing fights like we had [here],” he said.

“There is a going to be a lot of tyre degra­da­tion as we have got the super soft and the soft tyres there, so it is going to be very tricky for all of us. It will make it fun for sure.”

McLaren team prin­ci­pal Mar­tin Whit­marsh said the fact both Hamil­ton and But­ton have won at Monaco added to the team’s chances of suc­cess in the principality.

“We’ve seen both Lewis and Jen­son do great jobs there, they love Monaco, we’ve won it 14 times and we’d like to do it again,” he said.

How­ever he said the race would not nec­es­sar­ily be a duel between McLaren and Red Bull.

“Don’t under­es­ti­mate the oth­ers, Fer­nando [Alonso] did a fan­tas­tic qual­i­fy­ing lap yes­ter­day, he can pull those sorts of things out.

“At the moment I think we’ve got some pace on them [Fer­rari], but they can improve very quickly and so can Mercedes.

Asked to explain why McLaren’s pace was so much closer to Red Bull in the race than in qual­i­fy­ing, Whit­marsh said: “Red Bull do a num­ber of things to set their car up for qual­i­fy­ing that make it very quick.

“We are work­ing on some of those areas, but we work quite hard to make sure we have a good race pace. You need that. But ulti­mately you need a bet­ter track position.

“We had the race pace today. We didn’t have track posi­tion. We didn’t qual­ify well enough. So we have to work on that and get the job done in qualifying.

“We’ve cer­tainly put half a sec­ond on the car but we need another few half seconds.

“Monaco is a very dif­fer­ent type of track. We have super-soft tyres com­ing and have very lim­ited expe­ri­ence of those.”

Mark Web­ber won from pole in Monaco last year while Vet­tel has a first win around the famous cir­cuit in his sights.

And Red Bull boss Chris­t­ian Horner is pre­dict­ing that race strat­egy will once again likely to be the key to suc­cess in seven days’ time.

“We took a bold deci­sion today and it paid off, but I don’t think that will work in Monaco,” said Horner.

“It’s going to be all about tyre man­age­ment again. It’s less abra­sive than here. It’s going to be fascinating.

“With Sebas­t­ian we went for an extremely aggres­sive under­cut that relied on him mak­ing the passes. Are you going to have the brav­ery to do that in Monaco, where over­tak­ing is gen­er­ally impossible?

“The encour­ag­ing thing for us is that at five cir­cuits with very dif­fer­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics we have man­aged to be com­pet­i­tive at all of them and hope­fully we will carry that into Monaco.”

Related Posts:

• Hamil­ton Chal­lenges Red Bull Pace
• Hamil­ton Angered by Toro Rosso
• Rubens Unhappy with Monaco DRS Call
• Alonso Leads Hamil­ton in Practice
• Hamil­ton Cau­tious Ahead of Turkey

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