Lewis Hamilton: “I want to break the car as much as possible…”

Lewis Hamilton says he’s not concerned about facing unreliability problems in testing if it means that any faults are discovered before the season starts.

Hamilton was tackling a race distance for Mercedes in Bahrain today but was stopped by a hydraulic issue.

“It’s not frustrating at all,” said Hamilton of today’s problem. “We feel quite blessed that we’ve done the mileage that we’ve already done. We are way ahead of where we thought we would be, and particularly some others. We actually see it as a blessing, because we find an issue, and then we know it’s got to go back to the drawing board.

“It could be a small pump that they’ve got to go and redesign and get fixed, that could have gone in Melbourne, or one the races coming up. It would have caught us out and it would have been delayed. I’m glad these bugs are coming, I’m trying to find more and more. I want to break the car as much as possible, so they can fix it for the races.”

Regarding the Merc’s form, he said: “We’re just working in trying to improve the car bit-by-bit. We won’t know until we get to Melbourne where we stand exactly.”