18/03/2016
NEWS STORY
Carlos Sainz: "Not the easiest of starts to the weekend. During this morning's FP1 we faced a few issues that limited our running, but fortunately we didn't miss much because the track was wet for most of the session. The weather has been a bit annoying throughout the day, but at least FP2 was much better in terms of reliability. This afternoon we were able to run as much as we wanted and recovered a bit of track time we had lost in the morning. The car felt good in the wet, it gave me confidence in case it rains tomorrow or on Sunday and I feel in good form out on track."
Max Verstappen: "It was a bit of a tricky day today: we didn't complete many laps and the weather conditions were constantly changing… when we went out on slick tyres it would start to rain and when we went out on intermediates, the track would be drying up. It was nice to be back in the car again, and hopefully tomorrow we can spend more time out on track."
Phil Charles (Chief Race Engineer): "First day back at school! I had been looking forward to this day for a while as I expected it would be the first time this year where we would really start to learn where we rank as it is so difficult to judge in winter testing. Unfortunately the famous four-seasons-in-a-day Melbourne weather meant that we didn't really get to fill in all of those question marks in either session.
"Carlos had some problems in FP1 so we had to apologise to him after this morning's session. On the positive side we managed to put those issues aside in FP2 and we managed three decent runs with him on intermediate tyres.
"As for Max, we had a better FP1, managing some runs on inters and a couple of short blasts on dry tyres in between the showers. We managed to collect some useful aero data during these runs and we will spend some time tonight going through it in detail. For FP2 we were ready for some more dry running with Max, but since he had already done some laps on intermediates in the morning, we didn't need him to go again in wet conditions. In the end we simply didn't get the dry conditions we wanted to send him out. I'm sure he will be chomping at the bit to go again tomorrow!"
Check out our Friday gallery, here.