Reigning Formula 1 world champion Lewis Hamilton says Ferrari look “quite a bit ahead” ꦉof Mercedes heading into qualifying for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

Ferrari dominated when a truncated day of running finally got under⛦way in second practice, with Charles Leclerc heading teammate Sebastian Vettel and ending up over six-tenths of a second clear of Hamilton in third place.

The current championship leader believes it will be very difficult for Mercedes to redu🌜ce the de🌞ficit 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,” Hamilt𒁏on 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 ahead of us, so we’ll need to investigate to see where we are losing💞 time compared to them.

“It’s unlikely that we will find seven tenths over night, but we’ll do everyt♏hing we can to push the car in the right direction.

“Our long run pace looked a little b🌼it 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 unhappཧy 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 tried to m👍aximise the time on track, adding a few more laps to ou🥃r original 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, but corner speeds will increase due to track evolution, so we sh🌠ould be able to get a bit more ღenergy into the tyres tomorrow.

“Our long runs felt good and the pace didn’t look too bꩲad 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 single lap work, but looked reasonably paced for the l🍸onger runs.

“So we have a bit of work to do overnight to tidy up the handling to give the drivers the confidence to realℱly smash it around the lap and then hopeful🌱ly we'll have a good weekend.”