Hamilton shrugs off gap to Rosberg

Lewis Hamilton shrugged off the gap to team-mate Nico Rosberg following Friday practice for the Spanish Grand Prix.

Rosberg set the pace in FP2, beating Kimi Raikkonen by 0.25s in the second session. Hamilton was over 0.7s adrift of his team-mate after a scruffy lap and he said the gap was not a true representation of his pace compared to the championship leader.

"I got some traffic towards the end of the lap so it wasn’t as bad as it looked," Hamilton said. "Quite a bit of traffic at the end, yeah, so I lost quite a lot with that at the end. Ultimately the lap wasn’t quick enough anyway."

Like Rosberg, Hamilton admits he is struggling with the handling of his car despite the amount of testing the teams do at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.

"I think it’s the conditions. I think it’s the tyres and the wind, I don’t know if its maybe the tyres on their own. It’s not spectacular but it’s the same for everyone.

"It just gives us lots of homework to do, a lot of pressure on the engineers to analyse what’s going on with the car and for me to do the background work and trying to figure out what I can do to make it better."

With Rosberg mentioning the gap to Ferrari at the end of Friday's running, Hamilton says he would welcome a battle this weekend.

"I think we’ll find out tomorrow. Right now they focus on one thing, we focus on something else. We don’t really take much from today. Hopefully it’s close, if it’s close it means we have a good fight."

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