13/03/2015
NEWS STORY
Carlos Sainz: "I'm happy with today, I had been waiting for this day for a very long time and it was definitely a decent first day. We covered a lot of mileage, which was obviously our target for today as I am a rookie and new to this circuit. I enjoyed it a lot out there. Now we need to go through all the data we gathered today and keep improving. I feel very comfortable in the car. It's a challenging track, but I like it and all in all it's been a positive day."
Max Verstappen: "This morning we were able to complete many laps and it was good for me to get used to the track. It was a useful first practice and I was able to understand the car a bit more. I also didn't make any mistakes, so that was good. This afternoon unfortunately we were not able to spend much time out on track due to a battery issue. The team pushed very hard to send me out again but we ran out of time. It wasn't the best end to the day, but we will check the data tonight and hopefully we can make the best out of tomorrow's third and final practice session before my first ever qualifying session of the year."
Phil Charles (Chief Race Engineer): "Today is the first time we've taken our car to a race weekend and our two new drivers did very well. Carlos and Max were excellent and had absolutely the right approach, settling in nicely and making no major mistakes. We are very impressed. We had a bit of bad luck on Max's car, as a sensor issue in the battery meant that we had to change it. Therefore, he only had one run in FP2 and it's a shame we were not able to give Max the runs we should have done. Carlos did a really solid job on the short runs, even though there's a few bits we know we have to help him with on the long runs to get him as happy as we can. It's been a pretty good day overall, we had a few niggles with the car which we will try and iron out, get on with a good job tomorrow and hopefully we end with a good Sunday as a result of this."
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