Hamilton: Rivals' mileage 'incredible'
Lewis Hamilton believes it is essential for McLaren to be able to complete some race simulations in testing as soon as possible, having described rival teams' consistent mileage as 'incredible'
Although Hamilton did 93 laps in total today, only one of his stints was more than 10 laps long - and even that 16-lap run was disrupted as he backed off several times. Morning running had been interrupted by reliability issues that forced him to repeatedly pit.
"Today I had a couple of long runs but they weren't real race simulations," said Hamilton.
"I was getting overtaken a lot by other cars. It's always important at the beginning of the season in testing to get pitstops in and do a real race simulation. If you can do two in a day it's fantastic."
Asked how he felt about the level of mileage teams like Red Bull and Ferrari were accumulating, Hamilton replied: "It's crazy, 140 laps from [Mark] Webber. All I can do is laugh.
"It's incredible, they're really doing fantastically. We've not managed to get to that many laps, but slowly but surely I'm sure we'll get there."
He remains confident that McLaren can resolve the reliability problems it has had so far.
"Any reliability issue is a concern, but I feel like I've got great people around me, who will be able to solve whatever issues they have," said Hamilton.
"Bit by bit we've been able to solve whatever problems we've had and that's how we work. Of course we'd love to have no problems, but then it would be easy.
"We had a couple of technical issues which we were able to sort out and we did 90-odd laps today so that's an improvement, a step for us.
"We managed to get through a couple of long-ish runs but of course we want to get more mileage on the car so we'll try and do that tomorrow. It's a work in progress, we have more time to come."
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