Lewis Hamilton ended Friday fastest as the team got their Spanish Grand Prix weekend underway at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya. Sunny skies and warm conditions persisted throughout, with the mercury rising to close to 30°C at the midpoint of the day.

The team opted to forgo running the Soft compound tyre in FP1, focusing our work on the Hard and Medium compounds. George ended the first hour in P4 with Lewis P7.

In FP2, both drivers started the session on the Medium tyre, and looked competitive, before switching to the Soft tyre. Lewis set the fastest time of the day with a 1:13.264, 0.022s faster than Carlos Sainz's Ferrari. George suffered from traffic on his push lap on the Soft and ended the session a slightly unrepresentative P8.

Lewis Hamilton: FP1 wasn't the best session for us but we still learned quite a lot. FP2 was a lot better though and the car was feeling great. The track was very hot, so it was tough on the tyres, especially on the long run. Overall, though, it didn't feel like we were too far off being right in the mix at the front.

We have taken a step forward with the car in recent races. Everyone has worked so hard to get us to this point and make those incremental gains. We've got a clear direction of where we want to go moving forward too. We're starting to see that feed through to our performance on track. Hopefully we can continue the momentum from today into Saturday and get closer to our competitors ahead.

George Russell: We had a good day on track today. The car was performing really well around this circuit. It was encouraging to see Lewis top of the timesheets and we were consistently at the front.

Our long run pace in FP1 was competitive. In FP2, it seemed that our single lap pace was slightly stronger than our long run speed but overall, the car is feeling strong. It is only Friday, but it has been a while since we've been consistently at the upper end of the field. I'm feeling good and excited as this is what we've been chasing for a while. We won't get ahead of ourselves though and will work diligently tonight and tomorrow to prepare as best as we can for Qualifying and Sunday's Grand Prix.

Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director: We've had a solid first day on track here in Barcelona. We made a step forward with the updates we brought to Monaco and Montreal, but it's been encouraging to see that the car is working well around a track with plenty of high-speed corners.

Our single lap pace looks competitive and quite close with several other teams. It's always hard to know where you stand on Friday given the range of power modes and fuel loads, but we've also had many a good first day followed by a tough qualifying session. We will therefore focus on improving on the feedback that the drivers are reporting and see where we end up tomorrow afternoon in Qualifying.

Check out our Friday gallery from Barcelona here.