Jaime Alguersuari (15th): “It was a useful day, as we tested many elements and got a lot of information to analyse. Because we were evaluating some new components today, I expect us to make more progress tomorrow morning in terms of improving the set-up and balance of the car. I did a good long run, which is useful in terms of Sunday’s race. As far as our pace is concerned, at this stage I would say the upgrades we have are an improvement and I hope that translates into a better qualifying performance than usual. Traction and braking seems quite good and the main difficulty I am having is mid-corner as the softer tyres had some graining on the fronts during my long run. We need to think about that in terms of what it means for the race.”
Sebastien Buemi (17th): “We had a busy programme, evaluating various parts on the car and in the second session, I reverted to some of the older components while Jaime stayed on the new one, to get a clearer picture. Now we have to study the data carefully, because at the moment, it is hard to tell what improvement the new parts bring. We had no technical issues, so we ran trouble free in both sessions, which means we have a clear understanding of the tyres. As usual here on the first day, the problem is that you do not get much grip from the tyres because the track surface is dirty, so at first we struggled a bit, although this afternoon on the Option tyre, the grip level clearly improved. But we still need to work on improving the rear end grip for tomorrow.”
Laurent Mekies (Chief Engineer): “We had a few new aero components to evaluate, some of which we had tested before and others that went straight on the car today. It’s good that we got a full day of dry weather, given that there were a few showers in the surrounding area, as it helped our aero evaluation work. Apart from that it was the usual Friday work list: we evaluated the two types of tyre and they both performed very consistently. The rest of the time was spent on set-up work, with the usual trade off of very long runs, which we did with Jaime and single lap performance.”
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