16/03/2007
NEWS STORY
Felipe Massa: It was a good day. We did a good job of comparing the two types of dry weather tyre and this morning we also got the opportunity to run in the wet, which led us to see that the balance of the F2007 is pretty good. This was a positive start to the weekend, but of course what counts is tomorrow's qualifying and most of all, Sunday's race.
Kimi Raikkonen: We worked mainly on comparing the two types of tyre that we have, but I was a bit unlucky with the traffic and the red flag, which affected our programme. In any case, the car seems to be well balanced at this track and we managed to pick up a good base line of data to analyse today for qualifying and for the race.
Luca Baldisserri: The Championship has got off in a different fashion to the past, with Friday based around three hours of testing, divided into two ninety minute sessions and sporting regulations that call for the use of both types of tyre during the race and a duty cycle for the engines consisting of running on Saturday and Sunday in two consecutive Grands Prix, but allowing therefore for a change of engine after these 180 minutes of free practice. We are reasonably satisfied with the work we have done today, when the sessions were characterised by quite changeable weather conditions. We concentrated on tyre comparison, both in terms of performance over a single lap and on longer runs. Felipe was able to complete his planned programme, but Kimi was held up by the interruption halfway through the second session. All the same, we picked up a lot of data that will be useful for the rest of the weekend. The F2007 cars ran trouble free and seem well balanced. All in all, we can look to tomorrow's qualifying with reasonable confidence, while aware of all the questions that are still unanswered after free practice.
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