Hamilton's warning shot amid Mercedes' quiet start
Mercedes has usually shown its hand in testing with an ominous benchmark by now. It hadn't done so this year until Thursday morning, but Lewis Hamilton has already shown flashes off the track that should scare his rivals
Had George Russell not emerged to complete 23 laps shaking down the Williams on Wednesday, Mercedes would have ended a day of testing as the slowest team for the first time in the V6 turbo-hybrid era.
In what's proved to be a quiet start to pre-season for Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas, they finished 11th and 12th on the timesheets. Bottas is 15th for the week overall, while Hamilton is 17th. Only the troubled Racing Points and the largely absent Williams drivers sat behind them with one day of the first week of testing remaining.
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