Lewis Hamilton makes negative prediction for early season prospects as Bahrain GP approaches

Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton has said that it will be tough for him and George Russell to be competing for wins right at the start of the Formula 1 season.

The 2022 campaign is nearly here with the Bahrain Grand Prix taking place this weekend and it’s been fascinating in the build-up to the new year watching testing and how each team has tackled the challenge of the new rules and regulations.

Indeed, each team has taken a slightly different approach to the new-era and Mercedes have certainly forged their own path with them running with next to no sidepods but, despite all of that, Hamilton believes there are areas of the car that still need work and that competing for wins from the off might be hard.

“I’m sure everyone can figure it out, we’re not the quickest at the moment,” Hamilton began.

“Ferrari looks to be the quickest and perhaps Red Bull, and then maybe us or McLaren.

“I don’t know, but we’re certainly not at the top.

“Obviously it’s a little bit too early to get into that [championship chances], or have those kinds of thoughts, but at the moment I don’t think we’ll be competing for wins.

“But there is potential within our car to get us there – we’ve just got to learn to extract it and fix some of the problems. That’s what we are working on and everyone is doing an incredible job back at the factory working as hard as they can, but we have some hurdles to overcome.

“Obviously next week we’ll get a much better showing of our pace but I think people will be surprised maybe. People keep saying that we keep talking ourselves down but it’s a bit different this year.

“It’s not as good, I don’t think it’s going to look as it did last year with the difficult session we had in testing and then switch over into the race.