02/07/2021
NEWS STORY
As Honda insists that improved performance is down to hard work and a better understanding, Lewis Hamilton insists that the latest power unit has "something extra".
The world champion was speaking just moments after today's second session in which he and teammate Valtteri Bottas had finished 1-2, out-pacing title rival Max Verstappen by 0.217s.
Rather than admit that he and his team are bouncing back after suffering their fourth successive defeat, Hamilton continued to hint at a performance gain from the Japanese manufacturer.
"They've definitely got something extra in their bag, I already know that," he told Sky Sports.
"I think we've made some small progress today," he added, "but I think they still have the two-tenths or maybe it's a tenth and a half, something like that.
"We've definitely made some small steps forward," he admitted, "but not enough to close the two-tenths.
"Over a single lap, that felt OK, it felt pretty good, but I just expect them to turn up a little bit more tomorrow.
"They've got... they've almost basically got the qualifying mode that we used to have, and I asked the guys, I don't understand where they get it from, but it's impressive and we've got to work hard to try and see if we can match it tonight."
"The current performance improvement is a result of the hard work of Honda and the teams," said Honda's F1 Technical Director, Toyoharu Tanabe just an hour earlier at the official FIA press conference. "Under the current PU regulations, we need to submit any changes, so, only allowed to change for reliability, cost reasons and logistics. Then we need to submit very detail to the FIA first and then the FIA approve the changes and the FIA distribute documents to the other PU manufacturers.
"We need to have approval from other PU manufacturers to change any single part's specification," he insisted. "So, we are very careful to change the performance. And it is not possible to improve performance during the season. That is my answer to that suspicion."
"It's been a bit of a struggle," said Hamilton of his day, "in P1 it was a bit of a struggle because I was just trying a different variant of the car and the car was unhappy. So then I had to make some more changes back, similar to what I had last week, some other adjustments, and it felt much better so I'm generally happy with where the car is.
"I'm probably not going to change too much. Because most often, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, most of the time we try to eke out more and it gets worse. So it will be the tiniest of tweaks."
Check out our Friday gallery from Spielberg, here.