Lewis Hamilton appeared downbeat about his Hungarian Grand Prix chances after a "struggle" during practice on Friday.
Given recent improvement from Mercedes some might have expected another strong showing from Hamilton in Budapest this weekend. After all, he and team-mate George Russell both stood on the podium in France last weekend for their best result of the season.
But practice showed them to be once again a long way off the pace of their Ferrari rivals at the front of the pack. Rain may provide them with opportunities this weekend, but still there is not a lot of optimism among the Silver Arrows racers.
"The car was a struggle today, it's crazy how it swings from track to track and tonight we'll be working on setup to try and get the car working," Hamilton said on Friday after the first two practice sessions. "At the moment, it's a little loose and not doing what we want it to do.
"Not much has changed since last week, I'm still the same driver! But for some reason at this track, the car isn't working as well. In the glimpses where it was working, we were still down a second which was actually similar to last week.
"I didn't get much chance of a long run at the end because I sustained some damage to my floor and lost a lot of downforce. It's going to be a tough weekend, but we'll give it everything."
Trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin revealed that Mercedes had been hampered by making the wrong decisions between those two practice sessions in terms of setups. "We'd made some changes going into the afternoon on both cars that look to have taken us in the wrong direction," he admitted.
"That's easy enough to undo for [qualifying], and it looks like we are going to get some rain so hopefully we can recover the situation but other than finding out what not to do, the afternoon wasn't a lot of use. To further add to matters, Lewis picked up some damage on his low fuel run which we couldn't repair in time so by the end of the session, the car was very difficult and very inconsistent.
"The weather for the rest of the weekend looks like a wet day followed by a dry race but in cooler conditions than we had today. Whilst we're disappointed with the pace in the afternoon, we've hopefully picked up some useful learning over the day."
