Lewis Hamilton hopes Mercedes can iron out the volatility from the performance of its W08 in the upcoming races after an inconsistent run so far in 2017.
Hamilton took a commanding win in Montreal, his third of the season, but under-performance in Russia and Monaco underlined his mount’s lack of consistency, an issue Mercedes traced to the W08’s inability to fully exploit its tyres in specific conditions.
Looking ahead to Baku, Hamilton is cautious on his prospects in Azerbaijan where he did not perform well last year and where it remains to be seen how his W08 will perform.
“I can’t really predict what’s going to happen,” Hamilton said.
“We’re going to go to another race – Baku is very smooth, a bit like Russia.
“For us, personally getting the car where we need it every weekend is definitely a challenge. But I think we’ve learned a lot from Monaco, I think we’ve learned a lot [from Canada].
“If we acquire the same diligence that we did in the past two weeks after every single race, even when we win, I’m pretty sure that we can continue to fight, and maybe not make the roller-coaster ride so up and down.”
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After its disappointing Monaco weekend, Mercedes kept the lights on 24/7 at its Brackley factory, working overtime to understand and attempt to solve its tyre and balance issues.
Canada was viewed as a turnaround for the Silver Arrows squad, a pivotal moment which Hamilton compared to the period which followed Singapore in 2015 where the German outfit endured a huge slump in performance.
“I think in Singapore it was a bit more of an unknown, what happened then,” he said.
“I definitely came away even after two weeks still not fully understanding why we were in the position we were in. It was a bit like that for all of us, even though we did come back.
“This time, as I said, the teamwork, the engineering, was so much better. We really understood where we went wrong, we really understood where the car was wrong, why we couldn’t activate the tyres.
“We came here actually with real knowledge rather than an idea of what potentially might have been the case, and ‘we’ll try a couple of them’. We actually came here with a real know-how of how to fix it.”
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Gallery: All the pictures from Montreal
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