"We sort of had a feeling that Fernando would be a bit lighter, and that didn't cause us any problems, but, especially towards the middle stint and towards the end, I had to try and keep up with Felipe [Massa] as I knew he was [running] a lap shorter than me, but they seem to look after their rear tyres a little bit better than us. In the last stint, I was able to keep quite close, and was pushing and pushing right to the last lap."
With all teams completing thousands of miles in testing at the Circuit de Catalunya, races don't tend to produce much in the way of passing, underlining Hamilton's claim that the start was key - especially with the top few teams all proving pretty evenly matched on pace.
"It is amazing how close all the cars are," he marvelled, "Even Robert was extremely close to me - I kept looking in the mirrors at a certain point and he was always in the exact same spot. It is very impressive that all the teams are so close, and it is good for the team.
"I know from past experiences in F3 that Robert is one of the hardest to overtake. He is very aggressive on the first lap, but I was able to get up the inside of him. I was pretty much past him and just had to make sure that I covered my ground. It was pretty smooth sailing from there.
"Qualifying fifth didn't really put us in a great spot to win the race, but we knew we had quite a good strategy and, at the beginning, I just had to try and make up as many places as possible. It was great to get past Robert, otherwise we would probably have finished behind him.
"I just immediately moved to the right, noticed that I seemed to have good traction and seemed to be moving at a similar pace to Robert. I moved to the right, and I think Robert was focusing on going to the left, perhaps to slipstream one of [the Ferraris], but I was carrying so much speed that there was no time for him to react and go back to the right. I don't think he hesitated, but I don't think he was expecting it."
