09/05/2014
NEWS STORY
Daniil Kvyat: "It was a productive Friday and I was quite happy with the balance. The car ran reliably on both the option and prime tyre, so we were able to collect a lot of useful data which we will study tonight. I have a good feeling and I hope we can come out strong in Qualifying tomorrow."
Jean-Eric Vergne: "Not a bad Friday, even if we still have a lot of work to do and things to understand for tomorrow. A certainly positive aspect is that we look pretty good on the long runs, so if we can manage to improve overnight, things should look better for tomorrow."
Laurent Mekies (Head of Vehicle Performance): "Overall, until five minutes to go, it was going quite well today. We had a solid Friday with pretty much all of our test items completed. As everybody, we had a few new things on the car here and we had to go through the process of testing them against our preview solutions and I have to say we feel like we have now the answers we were looking for. Pace wise, the field is extremely tight, with two or three tenth between being P6 or P12 so it's going to be about trying to extract everything out of the car tonight to be at the top of that group tomorrow. Unfortunately we had an issue with Jev's pit stop at the end of his long run, when we lost a wheel as soon as he left the pit lane, but luckily no one was injured. We have to understand exactly what went wrong and make sure we can correct that for tomorrow."
Ricardo Penteado (Renault Sport F1 track support leader): "A mixed day today. We have gathered plenty of results that we will analyze tonight but also need to make some improvements. On a positive note the new software package introduced this weekend is working well, and demonstrates a good step forward for both fuel and energy management. We now need to pull all the information together to maximize our qualifying and race strategy but it's been a good start."
Check out our Friday gallery, here.