Silverstone is Lewis Hamilton's spiritual motorsport home, with a record eight victories in the British Grand Prix under his belt. But he looked far from his usual self on Friday in practice for this year's event.
Hamilton was just 12th in FP1, and dropped to 15th in the later session. His Mercedes team mate George Russell was also struggling for grip, ending trhe day in 12th place.
That's far from where the drivers and the team expected especially given they were rolling out new parts this weekend in hopes of regaining the initiative after a disappointing time last week in Austria.
But it didn't seem to pay off for them on Friday, and Hamilton admitted that he wasn't sure what had gone wrong for them.
"It's a tough car to drive," he acknowledged. "And no matter what we do to set up, it continues to be a tough car to drive.
"On single laps we didn't feel any improvement between the times, which shows us something's wrong," he continued. "We're missing something."
"On the long run didn't seem to be too bad, so that's the positive at least," he added. Hamilton was also encouraged that he had been feeling more confident with the handling of the car toward the end of the second session.
"The last part of my run was starting to be more consistent for whatever reason," he confirmed. "It could be wind, it could be just balance, or me getting used to the balance.
©Mercedes
Russell was also struggling for grip on the soft compound and reported that he was sliding all over the place in the session, meaning there will need to be a lot of work done overnight by Mick Schumacher back at Brackley.
"Definitely not our finest Friday," he admitted. "We need to try and get to the bottom of it because the pace in FP1 was looking reasonably good on the medium tyre. We thought we were right up there if we took the softs, but in FP2 we were nowhere. So we just need to try and understand that.
"We definitely made quite a few changes from FP1 to FP2, but we maybe didn’t compensate enough for the conditions. All learning, but just a difficult afternoon for sure.
"We'll try and work on it tonight and Mick will do some work in the simulator, so hopefully we'll come up with some answers."
Another factor could be the the weather. Today was very hot by Silverstone standards, with strong sunshine and breezy winds. But that likely won't be the case over the rest of the weekend.
Saturday is supposed to be cooler with rain and even thunderstorms forecase for final practice and qualifying, which could prove to be a game changer. And Sunday could also see showers hit the race.
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