25/10/2013
NEWS STORY
Valtteri Bottas: We went through our planned programme in both the morning and afternoon sessions here in India. We tried a lot of different things in terms of aero and mechanical set-up, so we need to assess the data tonight to see what worked best. The driving from my side felt good and I managed to adjust to the track quite quickly. It's a great track and very fun to drive, so I enjoyed the day today. We'll see where we are compared to the others tomorrow and try to do our best.
Pastor Maldonado: We had a good first session this morning completing all planned runs. FP2 was also quite good as we were working on the car, trying to help the balance and improve the speed. We are not expecting things to be much different to the previous few races. In the race simulation laps, the front-right felt a bit loose, so I stopped the car. The team will now investigate this issue further.
Xevi Pujolar, Chief Race Engineer: We completed some aerodynamic tests on both cars during FP1 and overall the drivers happy were happy with the car. As always we see understeer at this circuit so we continued to make changes to the set-up as the track conditions improved throughout the day. We made some changes to the rear wing level in FP2 to improve our top speed and were planning long runs with both drivers to evaluate the tyres. Unfortunately we had to cut Pastor's run short as we had a problem with the front-right wheel nut following a pitstop. We are still investigating what happened. Valtteri continued with some mechanical tests followed by a longer run on the soft option tyre, so we have some good data for this compound. We need to continue tomorrow to gather more information on the medium tyre to make sure we have enough information to prepare for the race on Sunday. Overall the car balance looks better at this circuit, but we need to try to extract a bit more performance ahead of qualifying.
Check out our Friday gallery, here.