Lewis Hamilton says the is still more performance to come from his Mercedes despite the team comfortably heading Friday practice for the Australian Grand Prix.

The world champion was eight-tenths of a second quicker than Mercedes’ closest rivals Red Bull and Ferrari, though the latter seemed not to reveal their true pace in the second practice session.

Nonetheless Hamilton believes Mercedes can improve their car a lot overnight.

“I have a positive buzz from driving the car today,” said Hamilton. “This is what I love doing.

“The car feels like it’s in a similar place to where it was in Barcelona, which is positive coming to a different track. We got through our programme really well, there were no issues on track.

“There’s plenty of stuff that we can improve on, but this was not a bad start. What we have to do now is really study and analyse everything, as we always do on a Friday night. But the fact is we’ve got two cars that continue to go around, none of us made a mistake and we kept the cars in one piece. That counts for a lot.”

Valtteri Bottas believes the team have made a step forward since it last ran.

“The car felt better than it did in testing,” said Bottas. “We didn’t bring a lot of new parts to the car, but we were able to optimise the package that we have.”

However Bottas admitted their rivals performance remains unknown. “We haven’t seen the full performance from any of the other teams,” he said.

“We have an idea of how much we can improve for qualifying, but we have no idea how much performance the other teams can still bring.”

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2019 F1 season