Mercedes drivers 'feeling good' after opening day at Dutch GP

Lewis Hamilton and George Russell were both quite satisfied with Mercedes' opening day of running at Zandvoort on Friday, with both drivers feeling competitive around the Dutch circuit, with more gains to unlock.

Hamilton and Russell were delighted to get back into the groove after F1's summer break and had no specific complaints to formulate after their sessions.

Mercedes' first practice was focused largely on validating a series of test items on the team's W14 and upgrades brought to the venue.

"That was a great day for me," commented Hamilton, who concluded his P4 in the pecking order, 0.308s behind McLaren pace setter Lando Norris. .

"I woke up this morning so excited to get back in the car, and from the first lap it felt like we had a good starting point to work from.

• 2023 Dutch Grand Prix Free Practice 2 - Results

"The first practice session was generally good; we made some changes for FP2, and I'm not sure if we progressed or not from them, so we will deep dive tonight to investigate.

"Overall, the car is feeling more competitive here, so we want to hold onto that and see if we can extract more for tomorrow."

The work conducted by Mercedes in FP1 meant that the team ran new tyres only late in the session, by which point its efforts were somewhat hampered by a red flag triggered by a minor crash by Haas' Nico Hulkenberg.

On paper, Russell was well adrift from Hamilton in terms of his best lap time, but the former was anything but worried by the deficit.

"Overall, it's feeling good out there," Russell commented.

"The race pace was looking strong, and there is plenty of potential in there for qualifying as well, even if it didn't quite show in the headline times for me today.

"Definitely this was one of our better Fridays and I'm optimistic for the rest of the weekend."

Mercedes trackside engineer Andrew Shovlin also labeled Friday's running as "encouraging".

"The second session was quite clean, the medium tyre was working well but we've got room for improvement on the soft," he said.

"Neither driver felt that they got the best from it so that's something for us to work on overnight.

"The long runs were okay, we need to find a bit of consistency but the pace looks to be there and the balance is reasonable. Overall, an encouraging day."

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