Lewis Hamilton feels he has a Mercedes beneath him that is “feeling more competitive” following an encouraging day of practice for the Dutch Grand Prix.

The seven-time F1 champion was consistently in the mix throughout both of the hour-long sessions at Zandvoort, culminating in the fourth-quickest lap at the end of FP2, three-tenths of a second behind McLaren’s Lando Norris.

With the W14 sporting upgrades including a new floor edge, sidepod inlet, and beam wing, both of which have been designed to improve the airflow to the rear of the car, Hamilton was left in a remarkably upbeat mood following a regulation practice outing.

“That was a great day for me,” said the 38-year-old. “I woke up so excited to get back in the car, and from the first lap, it felt like we had a good starting point to work from.

“The first practice session was generally good; we made some changes for FP2, and I’m not sure if we progressed or not from them, so we will deep dive to investigate.

“Overall, the car is feeling more competitive here, so we want to hold onto that and see if we can extract more (for qualifying).”

Team-mate George Russell may only have been 14th on the timesheet and almost an additional four-tenths of a second behind his fellow Briton, but he was also enthused by what he felt from the car around the short, narrow, seaside circuit.

“The race pace was looking strong, and there is plenty of potential in there for qualifying as well, even if it didn’t quite show in the headline times for me,” said Russell.

“Definitely this was one of our better Fridays, and I’m optimistic for the rest of the weekend.”

Trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin also felt the car worked “reasonably well”, and is now hopeful the new components will “help nudge us in the right direction”.

Although the first session was disrupted by Haas driver Nico Hulkenberg’s crash at a time when Mercedes was pushing the car, Shovlin was still left to hail “an encouraging day”.

“We had quite a few test items in the first session which meant we were running new tyres a bit later than normal, as a result, the red flag was quite inconvenient to us as we were trying to use new tyres when most of the field was on race runs,” said Shovlin.

“The second session was quite clean, the medium tyre was working well but we’ve got room for improvement on the soft. Neither driver felt they got the best from it so that’s something for us to work on.

“The long runs were okay, we need to find a bit of consistency but the pace looks to be there and the balance is reasonable.”