Reigning Formula 1 worಌld champion Lewis Hamilton say🍌s Ferrari look “quite a bit ahead” of Mercedes heading into qualifying for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

Ferrari dominated when a truncated day of running finally got underway in second prac🔯tice, with Charles Leclerc headi💎ng teammate Sebastian Vettel and ending up over six-tenths of a second clear of Hamilton in third place.

The current championsh💜ip leader believes it will be very difficult 🧸for Mercedes to reduce the deficit to Ferrari in time for qualifying, but stressed he is up for the challenge ahead.

“It’s been a bit of an odd day, but I still enjoyed it,” Hamilton said. “FP2 went really well, I was feeling good out there and I was more comfortable 🦩in the car than I was last year.

“However, the Ferraris are clearly very quick and it looks like they’re quite a bit aheadﷺ of us, so we’ll need to investigate to see where we are losing time compared to them.

“It’s un🌊likely that we will find seven tenths over night, but we’ll do everything we can to push the car in the right direction.

“Our long run pace looked a little bit stronger than our short run pace, so we’ll need to try and find out why. It should be a good fight tomorrow; I’m always down for a fight and I think that’s what the✨ fans want to see, so I’m looking forward to tomorrow.”

Bottas, who finished fifth in the timesheets and over a second off the pace of Leclerc, was left unhappy with his short runs and conceded Ferrari looks to be💜 the team to beat.

“It’s been a fairly disrupted day which made FP2 more important than usual,” Bottas explained. “We trieಞd to maximise the time on track, adding a few more laps to our o🧸riginal plan for the afternoon after FP1 was suspended.

“I’m♈ not really pleased with the laps I did, but it’s always a bit tricky to find the rhythm in Baku and it takes a bit of time.

“It wasn’t easy to get the Medium compound up to the right temperatures today, b🐽ut corner speeds will increase due to track evolution, so we should be able to get a bit more energy into the tyres tomorrow.

“Our long runs felt good and the pace didn’t look too ba🉐d either, but we are a bit behind on single lap pace. Ferrari looked really strong, particularly on the short runs, so it will be a tough fight tomorrow.”

Techincal director James Allison added: “We're not where we need to be lap for the♔ sinཧgle lap work, but looked reasonably paced for the longer runs.

“So we have a bit of work to do overnight to tidy up the handling to give the drivers the confidence to really smash it around the lap and then hopefully we'll have a good we𒉰ekend.”