Hamilton: The car is feeling more competitive

While Max Verstappen remained the person to beat, Mercedes seemed to be in the fight for second best status with Aston Martin in Zandvoort as both face a stern challenge from McLaren as Lando Norris topped FP2, a session Hamilton ended fourth fastest.

The seven-time Formula 1 Champion was third fastest in FP1 behind Fernando Alonso in the Aston Martin, and while Ferrari seem to be nowhere (not even featuring in the top ten) and with Williams disturbing the order, Alex Albon finishing third fastest in FP2, it would be interesting to see the order that emerges following qualifying on Saturday at Zandvoort.

Speaking in Mercedes' team report, Hamilton reflected on Friday's running, he said: "That was a great day for me. I woke up this morning 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 tonight 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 tomorrow," he concluded.

Hamilton's teammate George Russell, was 11th and 14th fastest in FP1 and FP2 respectively, but maintained his optimism for the rest of the weekend, banking in some decent race pace from his W14 that featured some upgrades this weekend.

"It felt good to be back in the car after several weeks out of the cockpit," Russell said. "Overall, it's feeling good out there: 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 today.

"Definitely this was one of our better Fridays and I'm optimistic for the rest of the weekend," Russell claimed.

Mercedes' Trackside Engineering Director, Andrew Shovlin, summed up the team's Friday, he said: "We're all really excited to get back to racing after the break.

"We've been able to bring a few updates to this race which will hopefully help nudge us in the right direction; certainly, the car seems be working reasonably well.

"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. 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 that they got the best from it so that's something for us to work on overnight.

"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. Overall, an encouraging day," Shovlin concluded.