Lewis Hamilton says Mercedes' car is "not spectacular" and is lacking pace everywhere around the Paul Ricard track, but the Briton is confident of achieving an overnight step up in performance.
Hamilton was back in action in FP2 after sitting out Friday's opening practice as Mercedes assigned his car to reserve driver Nyck de Vries.
"It was kind of crazy because I hadn’t even driven the car from where Nyck was," Hamilton said.
"Nyck did a great job this morning, kept the car in one piece and was great out there. So I’m grateful for the work he did this morning."
The seven-time world champion quickly got back into the groove and clocked in fifth at the end of the 60-minute session, one spot and 0.214s behind teammate George Russell and 0.990s adrift from Ferrari pacesetter Carlos Sainz.
Hamilton admitted that he had expected to be a bit closer to his leading rivals, as Paul Ricard's smooth surface and layout is theoretically well suited to Mercedes' car.
He even suggested that the Brackley squad's silver arrow has lost a bit of ground to those at the front since Austria.
"Today we’re in fourth and fifth so that’s kind of the region that we’ll be fighting for," he said.
"I don’t mean that we can’t be on the podium, I think we can still be up there. We’re just still not as quick as those front guys – we’re a little bit further back than we were in the last race."
But Hamilton was confident that the team's deficit is not something that can't be solved overnight.
"The car’s not spectacular here, we don’t know why, but hopefully overnight we can make a bit of a step," he said, adding that the W13 was lacking pace "everywhere".
"It’s just every corner. I’m going to have to dig deep into the data, but it just feels like we’re lacking downforce today. But otherwise it’s okay, I can only have empathy for the guys even further back.
"I think generally this generation of car is definitely nowhere near as good as it used to be in terms of grip and stuff that we had in the past," he added.
"But it also is the first year of this generation so I’m sure it’ll get better over the years. But we have work to do, we’re a little bit further behind than we anticipated this weekend."
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