F1 | Two-faced Mercedes in China: Hamilton with talent and strategy, Russell cannot be found in the wet

Little smiles for the Mercedes after the Sprint qualifications of China. Lewis Hamilton took second place, and will therefore start on the front row, alongside Norris of Sprint Race tomorrow morning. The English champion found himself on pole for a moment, but the FIA he did the usual chaos with the track limits, first taking away and then giving back the time to the driver McLaren. The seven-time world champion managed with his talent and also with cunning and strategy to achieve an excellent result on a car that was once again difficult in dry conditions. However, it went very badly George Russel, eleventh and therefore out in SQ2: the Briton was unable to replicate the performance of his teammate, from another planet in these difficult conditions.

“It was a difficult day – said Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes' head of track engineering. We knew that racing here for the last five years, the circuit would probably be very green in the practice session, and that's exactly what happened, so we decided to only use one set of hard tyres. This gives us the advantage for the rest of the weekend. We hope it proves useful as the track continues to evolve. Given the only hour of testing, we knew it would be a real challenge to get the cars into the optimal window for Sprint qualifying. This was complicated even more by the changing weather conditions."

After getting both cars into SQ2, George suffered from lack of tire temperature on his first flying lap. When the rain came, he found himself in the wrong place. Lewis however made it, and after a good call from him and the team, riding a new set of intermediates with more pressure, he did a great job to qualify in second position. Our pace in the dry wasn't spectacular, but with Lewis we will try to keep the fastest cars behind in tomorrow's Sprint Race."

“George should be able to make some progress from his starting position, and hopefully he can fight for the points. Tomorrow's race will help us understand several things that we can use to make further changes to the W15 before qualifying and ahead of Sunday's race."