Hamilton: "Don't hold your breath" for great F1 2017 racing

Hamilton has long voiced concerns that the new rules could make the racing worse in F1 – and the Briton appears to be even more convinced of that possibility following the three days of Barcelona pre-season testing so far.

"The  issue is exactly the same as it was before," said Hamilton. "We’ve got all this downforce and we need more mechanical grip. We need better grip from these bigger tyres, and less downforce, whereas it’s gone the other way.

"Let's hope the racing is fantastic, but don't hold your breath, I would say."

While Pirelli's new tyres are designed to better cope with the dirty air from rival cars, Hamilton is certain that won't make it sufficiently easy to follow others on track.

"I don't think it was ever the case of the tyres going off [in dirty air]," he said. "It was always the aero, in the front wing and in the rest of the car.

"Now the turbulence is easily twice as powerful from the back of the car so this magnifies the issue we had before."

"We weren't listened to"

After Hamilton said on Monday that his first test run suggested his suspicions about the challenge of following rivals in 2017 were correct, Red Bull's Max Verstappen offered a different opinion, saying it felt no different to last year.

On Wednesday, Hamilton offered a further explanation of his view on the problem – and said his team "weren't listened to" when they had warned about the issue earlier.

He said: "When the proposals for the design came up, the engineers said ’this is the wrong design, this is the wrong way.'

"Some teams, at least my team, said it’s making the cars faster, it’s giving more downforce but the cars are going to be harder to follow because there’s more turbulence, there’s more powerful vortices coming out of the back end of our cars, which are ultimately the things that affect the car behind.

"Obviously we weren’t necessarily listened to and now we’ve got these cars, which look fantastic, I think, and they drive amazingly well - but as soon as you get behind another car, the car in front has a 100 percent pure air in front, and the car behind has half or less than that, so the car behind is getting all the different dirty air that’s moving in a different place.

"So when you get behind a car, the car feels one way for a second and then you get a crosswind or something that you're not expecting, or you lose front-end grip because the wind stops getting its force on the car, or the rear does, for example.

"It makes you have to lift and then you never get close enough. I experienced that behind several different cars, it’s not so easy."

Additional reporting to Filip Cleeren