Lewis Hamilton says George Russell‘s “position is a testament to the job everyone has done at the factory and finally giving us a car that we can fight with”.

After topping Thursday’s Free Practice 2, Lewis Hamilton qualified for the Bahrain Grand Prix in P9. The Briton says the change that was made on his car overnight ultimately compromised his pace.

“Yesterday George [Russell] and I were identical car set-ups and the car was feeling great and then we veered off,” Hamilton said.

“He went one way and I went the other. You could say the one I was on was not good on a single lap. I hope that it’s good in the race.

“I wasn’t comfortable with my race pace and so I changed the car to hopefully make the race pace better.

“There’s a lot of degradation with the rears and race pace is really everything here. Obviously position counts as well.”

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George, however, qualified in P3. Lewis says this shows the team has done a good job over the winter.

“George’s position is a testament to the job everyone has done at the factory and finally giving us a car that we can fight with.

“I just didn’t utilise that today when I made that set-up change. I put something on the car that we haven’t put on for the last two years and I was hoping it would be ok.

“I decided to stick with it and yeah, it wasn’t nice necessarily to drive.”

Lewis added the W15 is definitely a big step in the right direction for the team.

“The car is really fantastic, it is a real big improvement from the previous years. A lot more stable, a lot more fun to drive but we still have work to do as you can see.

“But for George to be three-tenths off Max [Verstappen], it’s incredible. It shows what’s possible and I think we just got to continue to add performance.

“If that’s our platform from here, we can chase through the rest of the season.”

While Lewis is not happy how qualifying went, he is satisfied that Mercedes has shown it can be competitive.

“For the first qualifying session to be as poor as that, so much preparation went into today and then it didn’t go the way… But that’s racing.

“But in terms of season, to know that we have a package that we can potentially fight with is really pleasing,” Hamilton concluded.