Lewis Hamilton has warned against pundits writing Ferrari out of the title race and has pointed to their Bahrain pace as evidence the World Championship race is far from a forgone conclusion.
The 5 time World Champions said he believed Mercedes were exacting maximum potential from their 2019 edition while Ferrari had the pace to match the Silver Arrows but need to “hook up” the car for a full weekend.
“They’ve got a good car, the Ferraris, it just doesn’t look like they’re extracting their full potential on the weekends” Hamilton told journalists.
“I think with what we have, we are operating at [our] full potential. But there will be more performance and improvements to come in the future, we will make steps forward.” He continued.
Ferrari have struggled so far this season despite their highly rated car showing signs of immense pace both in pre season testing and in Bahrain. Mercedes have had a pace advantage in both Australia and China and stole a win from the Scuderia in Bahrain to take a commanding lead in the championship race.
But Hamilton was convinced that Ferrari have more to show and that the pecking order was very much undecided.
“The Ferraris are right there. I think we’ve got races coming up that could potentially suit them more. We didn’t expect to have the (advantage) in Melbourne, we didn’t expect to have the deficit [in Bahrain] and we didn’t expect this weekend to have the bit of advantage we had here. So it’s still up in the air.”
The next race takes place on April 28th in Azerbijan where Ferrari will attempt to bounce back with victory around the streets of Baku.
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