20/06/2014
NEWS STORY
The Marussia F1 Team enjoyed its first taste of the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg today, which is an entirely new experience for both the Team and its drivers.
The focus was on confirming the recent simulation work and gathering as much data as possible for evaluation into the next two days of running and racing.
This morning, light rain intervened in proceedings and gave rise to a stop-start session. This afternoon's running was rather more fluid and both Max Chilton and Jules Bianchi were able to make good progress, completing their programme checklists and ending the day in 18th and 20th places respectively.
Max Chilton: "Generally a very promising day for the Team, considering this is collectively our first visit to this circuit. I think we have been able to extract a lot of the potential of the car due to smooth running and we were able to get a nice long consistent race run. A positive start."
Jules Bianchi: "Overall we have ended the day with a lot of good information, which will be very useful in helping us to improve for tomorrow. I lost some time due to a radio problem, which kept me in the garage, but we started to recover quite well and I think there is more to come. This is a nice track and the early signs are that we can do well here as we have already showed some good promise versus the Saubers. I'm looking forward to the rest of the weekend."
John Booth, Team Principal: "Overall we have made a good start to the weekend, given that today has been our first taste of the Austrian circuit. We came here with a reasonably ambitious programme, not only in terms of giving the drivers the opportunity to learn the track, but also with quite a few set-up test items aimed at trying to improve the package that we have on the car. We have pretty much ticked off all of the items we needed to achieve today, including obtaining some good long run data to work with. It is slightly frustrating that we lost track time with Jules due to a radio problem, however he still managed to achieve some good information, albeit not quite as much as Max. Both drivers are reasonably happy with the car balance-wise. We went very early with our use of the option tyre, mainly because we wanted to ensure maximum long run information, so there is more to come as confirmed by the drivers, who were not 100% happy with their laps."
Check out our Friday gallery, here.