The heatwave currently hitting Europe, which has seen near record temperatures, is currently baking the track at Hockenheim ahead of Sunday's Grand Prix.

The high temperatures look set to continue tomorrow as practice gets underway, and while they are set to fall slightly over the rest of the weekend, heavy thunderstorms are also forecast.

Mercedes, which is known to struggle in high temperatures, is watching the mercury with interest, with world champion, Lewis Hamilton fearing the worst.

"I'd imagine, if it stays this hot, we're going to be in trouble," said Hamilton, who, along with teammate Valtteri Bottas, struggled a few weeks ago in Austria in the unusually high temperatures, the German team unable to get to grips with cooling issues that affected the W10.

"We've got these hot races coming up which are obviously not so easy for us, so it's going to be a challenge," he added.

Referring to the threat of storms, he smiled: "It's definitely a good thing if it rains.

"There's not really much we can do," he said of the cooling issues, "it's a much bigger design issue that we have when it gets hot, so it's not so easy to change... hopefully we'll be OK."

"After Austria, it was quite a strong reaction from the team," added Bottas. "Clearly cooling is a big weakness in our package. We basically just reintroduced a new upgrade for the cooling systems, so that should be more efficient and should give, hopefully, quite a few degrees of margin. But I'm not sure anyone expected to be racing in 40 degrees!

"There's also a pretty nice new aero package, which should give general performance through the car. We'll see as we go, but for sure, there's only one goal for me personally for the weekend, and that is to try and win the race."

Check out our Thursday gallery from Hockenheim, here.