20/09/2013
NEWS STORY
Jenson Button: "This morning was about getting used to the circuit again, putting laps on the car and doing aero comparisons. This afternoon the car felt better, but it’s strange how much of a difference there seems to be between the tyres. I found about 3.0s from my Prime run to my Option run.
"On the long runs at the end of FP2, the Option tyre felt good; but, as soon as we put the Prime tyre on, there was lower grip and we struggled to get good balance. On the plus side, though, the ride has been good and we haven't had the rear-end bouncing that we had earlier in the year. So, overall, I'm pretty happy with P7. I wouldn't mind being P7 on the grid, in fact. I don't think that's too bad for us right now."
Sergio Perez: "It was an interesting day, testing the two compounds Pirelli brought here. It's the first time this year we've had such a difference between the two compounds - nearly 3.0s - so to get the balance right was pretty difficult. We're in decent shape here, though. But obviously a lot depends on how we fare in qualifying.
"In many ways this circuit is completely different from any other track we've visited so far this season. Having said that, we're using a very similar aero package to what we had in Hungary, and we hope we'll be reasonably competitive in that configuration. Unlike Hungary, though, it's a street circuit, which means the driver can sometimes make a bigger difference on a single qualifying lap, and I'm looking forward to tomorrow for that reason."
Martin Whitmarsh, Team Principal: "As always on the Friday of the Singapore Grand Prix weekend, the track was extremely 'green' in FP1, and that made things rather tricky for everyone early on.
"Indeed, the circuit's 'greenness', and the fact that Friday is always about data-gathering, makes it difficult to say anything definitive about our car's pace yet, but, having said that, we were reasonably happy with our long runs.
"To sum up, therefore, there are definitely areas in which we can find performance improvements, and our engineers are now crunching the data in an effort to do just that."
Check out our Friday gallery, here.