Mercedes fastest in interrupted final day of F1 Barcelona shakedown

Lewis Hamilton set the fastest time of the Formula 1 pre-season shakedown in Barcelona amid an interrupted day of running.

Lewis Hamilton in the Mercedes garage during the final day of the F1 shakedown. (Finn Pomeroy/Mercedes F1)

Mercedes topped the timesheets on the final day with the fastest time of the week, despite five red flags in the morning session and the Pirelli wet-weather test in the afternoon session.

"It's been an interesting few days, it's not been the easiest or smoothest running - we have some obstacles to overcome," said Hamilton.

"We'd always want more laps but I'm happy with today's running, I got almost 100 laps in today which for half a day's running, isn't too bad."

"The car is a lot different to drive than in previous years, as are the tyres, but we're working our way through our programme."

George Russell ran the morning session for Mercedes and was the fastest car on track, before Hamilton took over for the second session.

As the track dried from the wet-weather running, Hamilton ran through a series of laps on gradually softer compounds, setting the time of 1:19.138 as the benchmark for teams to take away from Barcelona.

"The whole team have done an amazing job this week, the men and women back at the factory have worked so hard, we've got a lot of data to go through from these three days and we'll just put one foot in front of the other and put in the work," said Hamilton.

"It was good to get a feel for the different tyre compounds but you never know where you are compared to the other teams on the first days of running."

Lewis Hamilton and George Russell ran fastest for Mercedes in the final day of the F1 shakedown. (Formula 1)

The final day was the most trying for teams, with Fernando Alonso's Alpine and Sebastian Vettel's Aston Martin both catching fire from a hydraulic leak and oil leak respectively.

Pierre Gasly crashed out of the morning session while driving for AlphaTauri, while Zhou Guanyu stopped twice on track for Alfa Romeo.

F1 returns March 10-12 for the official Pre-Season Test at Bahrain, before the circuit hosts the season opener on March 18-20.