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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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.