Hamilton, who ended Friday practice third-quickest behind Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and teammate 🦹Valtteri Bottas, ran a different rear wing configuration on his🌳 car as Mercedes split its strategy throughout the day.

In the firℱst session Hamilton reported he was “massively slow on the straights”💎 as he trailed a high-downforce set-up, before testing out a low-downforce approach for FP2.

“It’s a massively challenging circuit tryin🦂g to find that balance, and this morning we had it one way, we changed it for this afternoon, it was very, ve🥀ry similar,” Hamilton explained.

“You go faster in the first and third sector but you go slower𓄧 in the middle, or you go quick in the middle but slow in the other two. So trying to find that balance is very tricky.”

With mixed weather conditions forecast for the rest of the weekend, the teams fac🐷e a difficult decision over whether to favour outright top speed, or gamble on trying to boost their prospects for a potential wet race.

Hamilton warned the differen𒅌ce between getting the call right or wrong could prove make-or-break.

“Naturally if it’s guaranteed to rain th𒊎en you would want more downforce, but then iꦅf it doesn’t rain and the weatherman’s wrong - or the weatherwoman’s wrong - then you’re a sitting duck on the straights,” he said.

“So we hav😼e to be very, very careful and cautious with the set-up change𒈔s we make over the next day. But it’s not our first rodeo.”

Bottas is leaning more towards maxing out his straightline speed given that he is set💎 to drop five places on the grid for Sunday’s race after being penalised for triggering the Turn 1 chaos in Hungary.

“It didn’t look too bad today, the pace we had both in the short and the long runs was pretty de♋cent,” said Bottas♊.

“It’s always tricky to compare in detail, from pra🧔ctic💟e, but at least the feeling is good - that’s a positive.

“We definitely seem quite fast on the straightlines. Maybe less so in sector two, with all the corners, but probably for me, for the race, it’s impor🐲tant to be quick in sect𝐆ors one and three.

“If it rains, you definitely want more downforce,” the Finn added. “So we n🐟eed to see session by session how it’s going to look, but it’s going to be a key decision, what we choose for qualifying.”