Sunny and warm weather welcomed Sahara Force India to Barcelona as the team began its work for Sunday's Spanish Grand Prix, the first European round of the 2014 Formula One World Championship.

Nico Hulkenberg: "It was generally a positive day and we got all the information we wanted from the two sessions. We still have some work to do to find some performance in the car as we have the potential to improve. The track here in Barcelona is very challenging and it is going to be key to find some extra grip, especially when working with the harder compound. Degradation is high here, last year was a four-stop race and I expect the demands for the tyres to remain high this year as well."

Sergio Perez: "Today has been a fairly challenging day. Our race pace looks good but it will be crucial to qualify well because overtaking is always difficult on this circuit. The compounds available for this weekend are very hard and this creates some issues with getting the tyres to work as desired. We need to work on this aspect with the engineers tonight and then we will be able to battle for a place in Q3, which has to be our aim."

Robert Fernley, Deputy Team Principal: "It's been a productive day with 100 laps completed and no significant loss of time. We were able to evaluate some upgrades in the morning session and we were happy with the results, so we retained them for FP2. It got very hot in the afternoon and this makes it hard to find enough grip, but we have identified the areas of the set-up we can work on to improve our performance. We will work with the data we have collected to achieve that tonight. Our long run pace looks good when compared to our rivals so we can use this as a starting point to improve the balance of our car overnight."

Check out our Friday gallery, here.