Lewis Hamilton & George Russell underline Mercedes' struggles with pre-qualifying comments

Mercedes appear to be truly up against it at the start of the new Formula 1 season with it appearing as though they do not have the fastest car on the grid as things stand.

Qualifying for the Bahrain Grand Prix takes place later on this afternoon but both Lewis Hamilton and George Russell do not appear overly confident about their chances of being on pole.

Indeed, Red Bull and Ferrari are looking stronger and though we’ve seen Merc play down their chances before and then blow the field away, their concerns look a little more substantiated at the start of 2022.

Indeed, post-Friday practice both shared their thoughts:

“It’s all about lap time, and we’re certainly not where we want to be,” Russell said. “I think we’ve made a bit of progress solving some issues, but the pace just is not there at all at the moment so we need to really go over the data tonight to understand why we’re both struggling a little bit with the car.

“And we’re a long way off the pace off Red Bull, Ferrari – even the likes of AlphaTauri, Alfa Romeo are seemingly on our pace or even quicker. So, we’ve got a bit of work to do.

“We are truly throwing everything at [the car] at the moment to try and unlock the potential, which we think is there, but we’re just really struggling to tap into that at the moment. And everything we try is maybe one step forwards, two steps back, and there’s always a bit of a limitation – so it’s going to take time.

“I think we hoped that we could’ve solved it for this weekend, but how things stand for the moment, we aren’t in the fight and we’ve got some work to do.” 

“We’re faced with much, much bigger problems this year,” said Hamilton meanwhile. “And everything we do to try and fix it doesn’t really change that. It appears