23/05/2013
NEWS STORY
Daniel Ricciardo: I really enjoy street circuits and this one in particular, however, this morning we were slower than we had hoped and expected to be. I'm sure if we find some more speed for Saturday then it will be even more enjoyable. Jev and I weren't running the same settings and there is still a bit to come from myself as well, because you can always find a bit more performance from the driver on a street circuit. We now have one more day than usual to analyse everything and we also have some modifications we can make for Saturday. I am confident we can improve and I am still looking at getting into the top ten, but we have a bit of work to do to achieve that. As for the tyres, it's the usual story that the Supersoft is quicker and the Soft is more consistent, but I do think that running Sunday's race on a one stop strategy could prove more difficult than last year.
Jean-Eric Vergne: It was a good day with a lot of laps completed. At this circuit, driver confidence is an important factor and you gain in confidence with every lap you do, feeling you can push harder every time. My last long run looked pretty good at the end of the afternoon session. Now we need to put all the best elements together so that we can improve our overall performance and I believe we can do well on Saturday, much better than the story told in today's time sheet.
Laurent Mekies (Head of Vehicle Performance): Every year, the first time the cars go out on this unique circuit is something special. We ran different set-up philosophies across our two cars and in both cases we wanted to get in as many laps as possible. This had two purposes, firstly to get as much information to help in our understanding of what should be the best set-up on the cars, while also giving the drivers as much track time as possible, which is always an important factor here. We did this with a mix of short and long runs, all of them trouble free, so we got all the data we need to make the best choices for Saturday. It seems that we were a bit more competitive on the long runs than the short ones and, because here in Monaco, qualifying is so important, we will have to work tonight and tomorrow in shifting our performance towards the shorter run. The main positive element from today is that we ran reliably and therefore completed all our programme and have plenty of data to look at.
Check out our Thursday gallery, here.