2023 Formula 1 Japanese Grand Prix highlights

Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team

Lewis Hamilton and George Russell finished fifth and seventh in the 2023 Formula 1  Japanese Grand Prix.

Lewis Hamilton

I’m exhausted after that one! Ferrari brought an upgrade this weekend, and they were just a little quicker than us here. It was a hell of a fight. I was trying to hold on. We did manage to get ahead of Sainz, which was great teamwork and good work from the guys in the pit stop and the strategy group. That was the maximum we could have achieved today. We know how important the battle for second in the Constructors’ Championship is. I know how hard everyone at Brackley and Brixworth works to accomplish that. Minimising our points loss to Ferrari today was critical. There is still a long way to go until the end of the season.

George Russell

We will take the positives from today. The one-stop strategy didn’t seem optimal at the start of the day, but we made it work better than expected. Ultimately, though, we didn’t have the pace to challenge those ahead this weekend. I’m glad we tried something different, but the result was a fair representation of where our speed was. I think we achieved the maximum we could today. There was plenty of challenging but fair racing today. Initially, I felt like I had a good pace and was trying to progress. We were pushing in the closing stages, but ultimately, I don’t think anything we could have done would have changed the result. That’s all good, and it’s all part of motorsport. It’s been a challenging weekend for us here at Suzuka overall. We will try to understand why that was and come back stronger for the next race in Qatar.

Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director

We realised early on that we would not be able to challenge those further ahead for the podium. Our race today ultimately turned into minimising our points loss to Ferrari. We split our strategies to give us the best opportunity to do this. Getting one car in between the Ferraris was a proper damage limitation, given they both started ahead of us. At the end of the race, the odds of George holding back Sainz were relatively small because his one-stop strategy left the Ferrari with a sizeable tyre advantage. The reason that we committed to that strategy, though, was that we had very little to lose. He had no threat behind Sainz; it was a complex strategy to pull off, and he did well. The tyre degradation was ultimately too high to make it work. Given this, we had to protect Lewis from losing the position to Sainz, as he was the more likely car to finish ahead and therefore gave the instruction to invert the cars on track.

Mercedes-AMG F1 Team best pictures:

2023 Japanese Grand Prix, Friday – Jiri Krenek

2023 Japanese Grand Prix, Friday – LAT Images

2023 Japanese Grand Prix, Saturday – Steve Etherington

2023 Japanese Grand Prix, Saturday – Jiri Krenek

2023 Japanese Grand Prix, Sunday – LAT Images

2023 Japanese Grand Prix, Sunday – Steve Etherington

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