Lewis Hamilton has asked his engineers to make specific adjustments to his new F1 car in order to erase the defects of the Mercedes W10 Formula 1 machine of 2019.

In 2019 Lewis Hamilton won his sixth Formula One world title, but the Briton acknowledged that the W10 was not perfect, although better than the 2018 car.

“Last year’s car was much better [than the 2018 car]. “Lewis Hamilton acknowledged in an interview with AMUS.

“A lot of the things I asked for in the briefings with the engineers were put on the 2019 car. But there are still some fundamental things about the car that are not yet perfect. »

“For example, the ride over the bumps or the humps is still not great. When I look at the images from the onboard camera of the Ferrari driven by Vettel, his car is much smoother. For my part, the car moves so much that I can barely see the curve. »

However, the British driver stresses that his team excels in many other areas and does not hesitate to congratulate his engineers, without whom he would not be able to exploit the full potential of his machine.

“We’re still stronger in other areas, and my understanding of the dynamics of driving improves every year as I sit down with the engineers. 

“It’s getting harder and harder to understand tires, and it’s really fascinating to see what that means; braking temperature, tire temperature, tyre pressure. 

“These engineers are really smart and are light years away from me, but they can’t guess what I’m doing in the car. The key is to clearly explain to them what they can use from my impressions.”

Bottas was also asked what areas Mercedes can improve on next season:

“I think mechanically and aerodynamically in terms of cornering performance and overall grip it’s been a big strength for for us [in 2019].

“And we’ve been [able] also to unlock many issues we’ve had before like slow-speed cornering. For example like Monaco has been tricky previously but now we’ve kind of been able to be competitive there as well.” says the Finn.

“So in terms of the chassis side, we’ve made really solid progress. Obviously it can always be better but I think still lots of things we can do better around the efficiency, possibly with the aero.

“And I’m sure with the power unit we are also pushing flat-out because we know that the biggest weakness we have now compared to some other teams is just the straight-line performance.

“And for that there’s only two things, it’s the drag and it’s the power. So those kind of things we are focussing as well for next year.” concludes Bottas.