The opportunity to use more tyres during today’s practice sessions shows an improvement F1 should consider, says Lewis Hamilton.

Teams are normally restricted to 13 sets of dry-weather tyres during a race weekend. The rules require them to return four sets during the course of Friday, and teams typically use two sets each in first and second practice.

However teams knew in advance of today’s sessions that final practice would be cancelled, and took advantage of the chance to run more sets of tyres. Hamilton said this made for a “much better” day of running.

“Normally we only have two tyres per session. [But] because we’re obviously missing tomorrow we brought all the tyres that we have tomorrow, the two sets we have in the next session, into today.

“So that’s an interesting learning. Maybe they need to bring us more tyres in a race weekend and we can do three runs.

“If we had three tyres in practice one and practice two, and three and practice three, it would just be better for running, better for the fans because we run from the beginning of the session rather than wait 20 minutes and then go out.”

Mercedes were first and second in both practice sessions, Hamilton behind team mate Valtteri Bottas in each. “We’ve got through our programme,” he said. “Valtteri had a little spin on one of our laps that we were about to start. But nonetheless it’s been a good day. Valtteri showed good pace.”

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2019 F1 season