Antonelli encouraged by Mercedes race pace as Hamilton sees Ferrari power deficit looming larger

Kimi Antonelli says the pace he could run at on his way to victory in the Sprint bodes well for the rest of the British Grand Prix weekend, as Lewis Hamilton fears Ferrari has a bigger power deficit on long runs.

Mercedes was expected to be the benchmark at Silverstone given its power unit performance, but Hamilton surprised many by taking pole position for the Sprint during the Friday afternoon qualifying session. While Hamilton then led the first part of the Sprint, Antonelli overtook the home favorite to secure victory by over two seconds.

“It was a fun race – it was pretty flat out,” Antonelli said. “I had a good start but I couldn’t quite get the momentum into Turn 1 – I wasn’t alongside enough – but then I was able to keep up with Lewis and once I started to get into that overtake I started to close the gap more and more. Then made the move and obviously a bit more free air to try and pull away. But it was a fun race, flat out and I enjoyed it.

“Obviously I got a good run out of Turn 4, he went a bit wide and I think he used boost to defend, so I just waited and used it after Turn 13, used everything I had and made the move. So the car was really strong.”

Antonelli says he doesn’t want to overly adjust his car’s setup heading into Saturday’s qualifying session given how comfortable he was in the Sprint.

“No [there’s not much to change], to be fair,” he said. “The car felt good over the race, also in terms of degradation, so I wouldn’t want to change much. Qualifying is more about trying to extract more from myself, but I think we’re in a pretty good place.”

Hamilton was still relatively upbeat to be so competitive at Silverstone, but while he hopes to fight for pole position again, he sees the race performance as a potential weakness for Ferrari.

“The car was good today,” Hamilton said. “It’s felt good all weekend. Relatively decent start – I was battling with Kimi and a pretty good first lap where I was able to create a little bit of a buffer between us, and then I was pushing as much as I could to try to keep that gap above one second. But then in my tow he was just closing, and once he got into that overtake mode I couldn’t get rid of him. He was just on me from then on, and he came flying past on the straight down into Stowe.

“[Ferrari's performance] has been a big, big surprise. Honestly, the guys were talking about it being a six or seven tenths of a second [loss] on the straights. In the last race, we were losing four tenths on the straight in the race every lap and that's obviously a hard gap to try and close through corners. And I imagine it's something similar maybe here.

“It was less so yesterday – it seemed like we were doing pretty decent on the single lap – but in the race, that margin increases with deployments. But the guys have done a fantastic job just continuing to bring parts. They're pushing so hard and that's what I like to see.

“Everyone's progressing. I'm sure they're going to be progressing in qualifying. It's so close between us. I have some more time to pull out of the car. I didn't get absolutely everything out of the car in [Sprint] qualifying, so I'm going to try and see if I can pull that extra bit of time out so we can stay in the fight.”