Hamilton adamant: Mercedes 'certainly not on top'

Lewis Hamilton has reiterated his belief that Mercedes is not heading F1's real pre-season pecking order and that Ferrari "looks the quickest".

Although the raw numbers support Hamilton's view, Ferrari's Carlos Sainz has suggested that Mercedes is deliberately limiting its performance in testing.

As far as the Spaniard is concerned, Hamilton downplaying his team's expectations is "typical" of the Brackley squad's approach to pre-season testing.

But Hamilton insists that Mercedes' struggles with its W13 are real.

"I’m sure everyone can figure it out, we’re not the quickest at the moment," Hamilton said in Bahrain.

"Ferrari looks to be the quickest and perhaps Red Bull, and then maybe us or McLaren. I don’t know, but we’re certainly not at the top."

And the seven-time world also made clear that the current hurdles faced by Mercedes won't be surmounted in the first few races of 2022.

"I don’t think it’s going to look as it did last year with the difficult session we had in practice and then [the] switch over into the race," he explained.

"I think we have far bigger challenges this time and there not one-week turnarounds, they’ll take a little bit longer. But from what I told, we have a considerable amount of pace to find."

Hamilton is gunning this season for a record eight world title, an achievement that painfully eluded him in Abu Dhabi last December.

Despite his contention that Mercedes is lacking pace, the Briton is confident that the Silver Arrows outfit will reach its performance targets sooner rather than later.

• Read also: Sainz doubtful of 'typical' Mercedes pre-season narrative

"Obviously it’s a little bit too early to get into that, or have those kind of thoughts [of the title], but at the moment I don’t think we’ll be competing for wins," he said.

"But there is potential within our car to get us there, we’ve just got to learn to extract it and fix some of the problems.

"That’s what we are working on and everyone is doing an incredible job back at the factory working as hard as they can, but we have some hurdles to overcome.

"Obviously next week we’ll get a much better showing of our pace but I think people will be surprised maybe.

"People keep saying that we keep talking ourselves down but it’s a bit different this year."

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