Hamilton draws eyes with speedy time
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, March 4, 2013
Lewis Hamilton wrapped up his pre-season testing with Mercedes in eye-catching style on Saturday with a lap that was easily the fastest seen so far this year in Barcelona.
The 2008 Formula One world champion, who will make his Mercedes race debut in Melbourne on March 17, lapped a dry Circuit de Catalunya in one minute 20.558 seconds to top the penultimate day's timesheets.
Although too much should not be read into what happens at the test track, Hamilton's lap was more than a second quicker than his fastest time in qualifying for last year's race there (1:21.707).
It was also well inside Kimi Raikkonen's 2008 race lap record of 1:21.670.
"We were able to get through all the test items that we wanted to achieve... There's still a lot of work ahead of us to get to where we want to be but the team is doing a great job," he said.
"The reliability, the mileage and the step-by-step improvements that we have achieved during the three tests are all very encouraging.
His former McLaren teammate Jenson Button took notice on Friday when he said: "The one team that has been consistently quick has been Mercedes."
Ferrari's Felipe Massa was second on the timesheets, also wrapping up his pre-season testing, in a time of 1:21.266, while Adrian Sutil was third for Force India.
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