'Dream' day for Hamilton as Mercedes dominates Monaco practice

Lewis Hamilton admitted that Thursday's practice sessions in Monaco could hardly have gone any better for Mercedes and that it had a=been a "dream" performance by the Silver Arrows.

It's certainly a welcome boost for the squad's spirits, which arrived in the principality still reeling from the news of Niki Lauda's death at the start of the week.

"It's the dream for every driver to come to Monaco and have a car that you can exploit and utilise your abilities with," Hamilton commented after the end of the day's two 90-minute practices. "I'm really proud of the team.

• Hamilton and Bottas stay strong in Monaco second practice

"Naturally our goal is to try and do something really positive this weekend," he continued.

"We've made some small tweaks over the two sessions and during the sessions as well, but I've been quite happy with the set-up."

Hamilton and his team mate Valtteri Bottas were seven tenths faster than the next-best man on track, Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel. Hamilton's best lap of the afternoon clocked in at 1:11.118s, compared to 1:11.841 in the same session last year recorded by Daniel Ricciardo.

"Every year we come back here, it gets faster and you really notice it when you're going past the barriers," Hamilton acknowledged.

"Coming into Turn 12, you carry so much speed into that corner, and then there's just the wall in front of you; going up the hill to Casino it's the same thing. It's incredibly intense out there and you have to be so focused."

Although outpaced by Hamilton by a slender 0.081s, Bottas was also pleased with the day's work and already cautiously looking forward to qualifying on Saturday for the race.

"I think we've started the weekend on the right foot, but we're in Monaco and anything can happen," he said. "You need to find the limits on this track and I felt comfortable to push towards the limit, which is a good sign.

"In previous years, the car felt sometimes difficult to drive, but today it was very driveable, responsive and enjoyable," he reported. "Now we need to fine tune the set-up and make sure we keep going in the right direction."

Mercedes chief race engineer Andrew Shovlin agreed with his drivers positive comments, and said that Thursday had been 'fairly smooth" as far as practice sessions in Monaco could ever be described in such terms.

"The car was quite well-balanced once we got the tyres up to temperature," he said. "We expected the track to gain a bit of grip [after lunch], so the changes were fairly modest.

"We started the second session on the medium tyre, expecting it to be a bit of a handful but actually it was working quite nicely. We still seemed to have problems getting lap one out of the Soft, despite the hotter track temperatures in the afternoon.

"On the long runs we were suffering with an incredible amount of traffic and the drivers struggled to put two clear laps together," he continued. "That has meant we've not got quite the level of information we'd like going into the race.

Shovlin added that the atypical 'day off' between practice day and qualifying meant that the team could spend longer looking at the information it had acquired.

"It gives us more time to look at data and understand the issues," he said. "Our number one concern is getting the Soft tyre to work on the first lap.

"Our headline times were good today, but it took us a lot of laps to get there and qualifying is so important at this track."

He added that Mercedes' reserve driver Estaban Ocon would be hard at work on Friday in the simulator back in Brackley in the UK.

"We've got Esteban in the simulator this evening and tomorrow. so hopefully he can help with some of that learning."

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