The weekend of the 2022 Formula 1 Singapore Grand Prix is one of the most special and demanding of the entire season, as competing under the artificial light of floodlights in the middle of the streets in high temperatures and with humidity that borders on 90% is all hell for the pilots. For this reason, the entire grid is perfectly prepared to withstand the incredible physical effort required to drive for two hours at Marina Bay, and one who has done it perfectly was Lewis Hamilton.
The British driver trained very hard in the days before the Asian event to be able to return to the top of a free practice session, since he was the fastest in FP1, although in the second practice he did not manage to go beyond fifth place , more than half a second behind the fastest time for Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari.
When he got out of his car, the Englishman faced the press, eager to know the impressions of a seven-time champion who savored, despite being a simple training session, the honeys of first place.
“I started well, but I wasn’t so good in the second session,” acknowledged the Mercedes driver. “So I would say it’s more or less like any other weekend. The car is as it is, and it bounces around like crazy, but it doesn’t look like we’re too far away from this grand prix.”
“We may be a second behind [to Red Bull and Ferrari], I would say, something like that, but we have to keep working on it,” continued Hamilton, who doubts if he can get more performance out of his W13.
“There’s really not much we can do with the rebound, it is what it is, but setup-wise, I think George [Russell] was able to find a little bit more time,” he said. “I think on my side there is more time [to serve], and I didn’t get a good lap.”
The British driver hopes to get back into the fight for the remainder of the campaign and be able to be a rival for the championship in the 2023 season , but he did not want to hide the problems he had in Singapore: “I think that, with the configuration that I have, I blocked a lot, but we’ll fix it tonight, we’ll come back and try tomorrow.”
The physical demands of Marina Bay are such that even someone as prepared as Hamilton ended up exhausted, although he attributes his pain to something else: “I ended up a bit dehydrated after that session, so I felt a bit heavy and very hot, it was very hard, but the biggest problems are not the physical aspect, it is that you are bouncing so much that your head hurts all the time.
“This is a very, very bumpy track, so if you look at the bottom and see my helmet, I don’t have any fillings anymore, I lost them earlier in the year!” Hamilton joked. “I hope we can be fourth or fifth or something like that, higher up would be amazing.”
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