Assessing both practice sessions, Hamilton said: "It's generally been a good day - I love driving around this track, it's incredible. Fortunately for us it was dry today, which gave us plenty of time to get a lot of running in and understand the car".

Considering how the gap to the field is closing up, he added: “It's very close out there between Red Bull and us. I think they might be a little bit quicker at the moment. Racing Point are also looking strong, they're right with us as well and so was Daniel in the Renault. So that makes it exciting. We've got some work to do, that's for sure, to try and dial in the car a bit more. But it doesn't feel bad at all".

"I think the car is just different from race to race. Each race we go, some places we're ahead, some places we are behind. As I anticipated coming to this weekend, we're only into the seventh race, the field is going to get closer and closer as the whole of F1 develops. It's already showing this weekend as we seem to be so close with everyone".

As there still were some unanswered questions about the pure performance of the Mercedes' car, the world champion remains confident and relishes the battle to come: “We've got to understand why - whether they've taken a step forward or we've taken a step backwards? Or is it just the track layout or downforce level? Who knows? So we've definitely got some work to do overnight, dig through the data and try and dial in the car a little more. But it looks like we've got an exciting weekend ahead of us".