Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMercedes

Hamilton expects more Ferrari wins in 2016

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Lewis Hamilton predicts more races where Ferrari is quicker than Mercedes this season than there were in 2015.

Ferrari took three victories last year courtesy of Sebastian Vettel, with a strong strategy providing the first of those in Malaysia. Another victory in a crazy race in Hungary was followed later in the season by arguably the only weekend Ferrari had a clear pace advantage over Mercedes as it also won in Singapore.

Having seen Ferrari threaten to win the opening race of this year, Hamilton believes there are likely to be more occasions when Vettel and team-mate Kimi Raikkonen have the quickest car.

"I’m hoping that it’s going to be a good battle," Hamilton said. "There are going to be races where we are further ahead and where we finish five or ten seconds up the road, there are going to be races where we are wheel to wheel and races that, who knows, they might be ahead of us, more so than they were last year."

However, Hamilton believes it's tough to fully gauge how close Ferrari is to Mercedes on race pace as a result of differing strategies seen during Nico Rosberg's victory in Australia last weekend.

"I thought they looked quite quick, they were on a different tyre to me behind, a different strategy, for sure they looked quick at the end. I’m excited in the hope that we are going to have more close races like that moving forward.

"I don’t think Nico had particular trouble staying behind [Vettel] on the medium tyre when he was on the super-soft which was ultimately quicker for a short period of time, so we shall see.”

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.