Hamilton worried about traffic “danger zone” at Jeddah F1 track

The seven-time world champion had a near-miss with Antonio Giovinazzi when he caught the Alfa Romeo driver in a blind, flat-out section of the track during second practice ahead of F1’s inaugural Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. 

On-board footage revealed the scary moment Hamilton came across Giovinazzi, before he flashed past several more cars around the following sequence of high-speed corners. 

It has left Hamilton concerned about a potential accident, with the drivers hitting average speeds north of 150mph around the ultra-fast street circuit

Hamilton said the situation is “definitely a lot worse than a lot of places we go to” and described Jeddah as being “Monaco-esque.”

“The closing-distance speed on other cars is definitely getting to a bit of a danger zone,” he added. 

Hamilton was not the only driver to highlight concerns, with Red Bull’s Sergio Perez worried about the prospect of a “messy” qualifying. 

“It’s going to be tricky in qualifying, the traffic management,” the Mexican said. “It'll be [about] trying to be there at the right place. We saw what happened when everyone was on soft at the end, it can get very tricky very messy very quickly. 

“It’s going to be very very tricky to get the perfect lap out there.” 

However, Hamilton was left impressed by the circuit and its grip levels after topping both practice sessions on Friday. 

“What I noticed straightaway is that the grip is just very, very high, from the moment we went out,” Hamilton explained. “I don’t think we were much quicker in this session, we were pretty much the same. 

“Our long run pace was kind of similar, but otherwise decent. We tried a couple of different things with the set-up. 

“We’re not rapid on a single-lap, I’d say, compared to the others, but my long run pace didn’t seem too bad, so who knows what’s going to happen.”

Hamilton said Mercedes still has work to do to understand why it was struggling to unlock pace from the soft tyres, having set his fastest lap in FP2 on the medium compound. 

“The medium and the hard tyre, you saw Max on the hard tyre at the beginning in P1 and he was going quicker than the softs,” he said. 

“The soft tyre is probably a little bit too soft for the high-speed sections. It seems the tyre is giving up a little bit. But it’s still exciting trying to master the tyres. 

"I’m generally happy,” Hamilton added. “We’ve made changes between the sessions, I’m not sure which one I want to stay with but we’ll study through it tonight and work with the guys back at the factory and try to make sure we come with the correct set-up tomorrow. 

“It’s definitely not in a bad place, as I said, they [Red Bull] are quite quick, so we’ve got a bit of work to do.”