Nico Rosberg wasn’t completely happy with his Mercedes W06 on Friday, despite lapping the Barcelona circuit over a second quicker than anyone else.
The German used the soft compound tyre to jump to the head of the timing screens by some margin. However he claims the set-up wasn’t anywhere near being perfect, hinting that he could have gone quicker.
“The set-up was actually very, very far away from where we need to be, and we don’t really understand that,” explained Rosberg. “So the whole day we were chasing the set-up and trying to find the right direction.
“It was really difficult to understand the right way to go, I had a lot of oversteer in the car so the rear was just all over the place, poor traction and all these things.”
Despite this, his lap was just over a second off the lap record set by Kimi Raikkonen back in 2008.
Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel described Rosberg’s lap as the benchmark, and whilst he was some 2.5 seconds off on the same tyre, he was happy with his effort.
“I’m sure that the Mercedes time today was very, very competitive and is a benchmark but we knew that they are the ones to beat,” he admitted.
“I was pretty happy with [my lap]. Obviously nowhere near in terms of lap-time compared to what Nico did, but it was a different point of the day and probably all set up a little bit differently. All in all I got in to the groove pretty well, had a couple of decent runs.”
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