Formula One teams started their pre-season testing in Barcelona at the Circuit de Catalunya to get their cars in perfect condition for the start of the 2017 Formula One season in less than a month.
Also read: Formula One 2017 complete schedule
This was just the first of eight testing sessions prior to the start of the new season as teams look to cancel out any flaws in their car. Lewis Hamilton was the fastest on day one of pre-season testing, and with one of the aims of this season being faster cars with lower lap times, Mercedes and Hamilton did exactly that.
Sebastian Vettel, who set a time of 1m24.939s last year on the first day of pre-season testing was beaten by Lewis Hamilton by 0.113 seconds. So, it's fair to say the lap times are already much faster and we can expect a lot of high speed racing once the 2017 Formula One season starts.
"It has been a good day, a positive day for the team. Lots of laps and information gained so we can try to improve the car," BBC quoted Lewis Hamilton as saying.
Lewis Hamilton also spoke about the new rules which have been designed to make the car travel faster and said that it has already made a difference and the G forces are definitely higher. Formula One also introduced new tyres for this season to help the drivers push flat-out for much longer and Hamilton said its working as planned for now.
"The G forces are definitely higher. The load on the drivers is a considerable amount more than before. It is a lot more physical. I was always trying to pick up the speed through the corners and you have to drive a little bit different. It is a beast. It is so much better than last year."
"Normally you have a lot of degradation in these tyres but these ones don't. But there is not a lot of performance at the beginning of the tyre. They are very consistent, hard tyres. There is not a big difference from early on to later. There is a bit of a drop-off, but not massive."
The former world champion was really impressed with his car's performance after day one of practice. Despite only driving the new Mercedes car in the afternoon, Hamilton topped the timesheets with a time of 1:21.765 - a considerable improvement on the best time set in the entirety of winter testing at Barcelona 12 months ago.
"Pretty happy with the work everyone's done with the car - it looks fantastic. It feels great and there's lot of things we need to improve on, which we will, but a great first day to get that many laps in and our car looks the best, so I'm happy."
