'Something in the pipeline' - Lewis Hamilton hopes to challenge Red Bull by end of season

Following the team's double podium performance in Spain, Lewis Hamilton voiced optimism that Mercedes will be in a position to challenge Red Bull by the end of the season. Mercedes emerged as Red Bull's closest opponent on race day at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya after recently abandoning their zero-sidepod concept instead of a more conventional design and introducing several other upgrades.

In fact, Hamilton finished second behind Max Verstappen, and teammate George Russell moved up from 12th to third to complete the podium, holding off the other Red Bull, Sergio Perez, who had started ahead of him.

The seven-time world champion is confident that Mercedes will catch up to Red Bull before the year is up, although he reached the finish line about 25 seconds behind Verstappen and acknowledges the W14 is not currently in a position to compete with the RB19 on merit.

‘We need to be taking big chunks out of them with every step we take’ – Lewis Hamilton

When asked whether he could compete against Verstappen and Red Bull in any of the upcoming Grands Prix, Hamilton said: “With the current car that we have, I don’t think we’ll be matching their performance, but we’re working on improving the car. With the current package, we’re limited to the pace that we had today, but I think there’s a huge amount of work and studying and improvement that we hopefully will have coming in the future.

“Naturally, they should also be progressing through the year, so we need to be taking big chunks out of them with every step we take. I think today they were a good few tenths ahead of us, maybe half a second ahead of us per lap, and on a single lap, that’s a little bit bigger.

“But I think we’re going in the right direction and I know we have something in the pipeline moving forward, so I’m hoping that at least by the end of the year, maybe we can… It would be great if we could challenge them.”