Lewis Hamilton came to Valencia on a high after his victory in Canada, but Friday proved to be a frustrating day for the McLaren man as he struggled to find a good set-up.
Hamilton was eighth in FP1 and then 14th in FP2, albeit only 0.8s off pacesetter Sebastian Vettel even with his troubles.
Although he had a tough time Lewis was in a surprisingly cheerful mood after the session, and indication of his generally relaxed state of mind in recent weeks.
“I didn’t have a very good day today, just a bit of a struggle really,” said Hamilton. “I tried a couple of different things with my tyres and it didn’t work. But I feel quite confident that I can make some changes again to get me back into a good position for tomorrow. I don’t know why there’s such a big gap on Jenson’s side, I don’t know what problems he was having, but on my side we were having a lot of problems.
“I haven’t been happy at all with the car today, but you can’t always get it right. I think this year we’ve been pretty good at getting the balance right throughout practice on Friday and having nice, smooth days, but today has not been one of those days. I think I know what the problem is. I’ve just now made all the changes and I’m quite confident that overnight we’ll hopefully rectify the issues we had today.”
From the outside it was clear that Hamilton was having a few problems under braking, although he was far from the only driver with such issues.
“A lot of locking, a lot of flat spots. I flat spotted almost every single tyre I had today, apart from the rears. Hopefully tomorrow it will be better, as I said.
“If it doesn’t work with our set-up changes tomorrow, then I don’t know why it locks up. But I think I have an understanding of why at the moment.”
Adam Cooper F1 
hi it seems that all the drivers are trying to come to grip with the tyre problem ? whats going on Eric Roberts