08/07/2016
NEWS STORY
Rob Smedley, Head of Performance Engineering: We've been focusing on three areas today. Testing the new aerodynamic parts on the car has been the priority. We've got the new front wing here, so we're ensuring we've done our due diligence to evaluate it. We've also been testing various different set-up options across the cars, in terms of mechanical and aerodynamic set-up. We've been tyre testing, running the soft and the medium compounds. It's not that clear cut yet as we saw different teams doing a variety of programmes. At this stage, the medium compound looks a little bit difficult to manage for us and some of the other front-runners. We need to try and understand that. The pace is definitely in the car, we just have a lot of work to do tonight to ensure we can unlock it tomorrow.
Valtteri Bottas: First of all, it's good fun to drive at Silverstone. We've made some good steps with the car today from FP1 to FP2, but there's still plenty of work to do. It's been a while since we've run the medium and the soft tyres, so there's still some things to look into regarding getting 100% out of them. Hopefully tomorrow we can be closer to the front because there's a bigger gap than we expected today. Graining is still a bit of an issue with the soft tyres, but there's no problems with the medium. Tonight we'll be looking at the tyres and the new front wing.
Felipe Massa: It wasn't really a fantastic Friday. We are struggling a little bit in terms of pace on the car and I definitely expected to be a little bit better for a Friday, but we are working hard to improve our performance. Let's wait and see how we are tomorrow compared to the others.
Check out our Friday gallery, here.