Lewis Hamilton: “It was a good move by the team”

Lewis Hamilton admits he wanted to keep McLaren’s new diffuser on the car after practice at Silverstone, but says he’s happy that the team decided to take the conservative route and take it off.

After running the update kit on the Friday McLaren went back to a standard spec, but the team will run the new parts again in Germany tomorrow before taking a final decision on the rest of the weekend.

After a change of mind this week both cars will run the new floor and will be in identical spec, although Hamilton’s car will run with extra sensors at the start of practice. He’s confident that it will represent a useful improvement.

“For me when I put it on I felt something pretty cool,” said Hamilton on Thursday. “I’m just excited every time you get a new component and you feel the benefit. I felt some of the improvements there, but I was losing in other places, and it actually balanced itself out, and would probably be a little bit slower.

“So it was a good move by the team. At the height of the moment you want to take a risk, ‘Let’s keep it,’ and then you think about the championship, and [it’s] ‘You know what, it’s a good point, we should take a step back.’

“I think we’re confident that we’ve made another step forward in understanding it and trying to improve it and trying to make it work better than it was then. But we still plan on running sensors and that kind of thing to fully understand it. I’m sure it’s still not optimised. So we’ll keep on working with it, and I’m sure the other teams have to do the same thing. We don’t expect this weekend for it to be bang on, perfect. If it is then fantastic, but it’s unlikely.”

Hamilton said he hopes that the weather allows the team some dry running.

“For us of course it’s important in terms of our development if we want to get the most out and understand the most from the tests. It would be great if it were dry, because you can’t really test things in the wet.

“That’s why if you have a wet test day in Jerez you don’t really do anything, it’s difficult to get good readings because the grip is so low. So we have to wait and see. If it stays wet all weekend, you never know, we might end up having to do our testing at the next race.”