07/07/2017
NEWS STORY
Daniil Kvyat: "We had a productive Friday. Even if we had some small issues here and there throughout the day, they were not big enough to say that it affected our day too much. We now just need to keep working as we are and avoid any more issues - we have some room for improvement and we will try to fulfill this overnight in order to come back stronger tomorrow."
Carlos Sainz: "It's been a tricky Friday here in Austria - I'd say not only for us, but also for many other drivers out there. We need to learn from today. We know we are lacking a bit of pace - but not as much as the timing sheets show - so I'm confident that for tomorrow we can get a bit closer to the top ten. We will make a few changes overnight and keep improving!"
James Key (Technical Director): "A bit of a mixed day for us. We had some new parts on the car - some mechanical development - which has seemed to work as expected, so we're quite happy with that. This morning, the balance of the car was, in general, where we expected it to be. We didn't have a particularly clean session with either driver, but we were quite happy with where we were. Daniil was very comfortable with his car, while Carlos had a bit of balance inconsistency that we needed to sort out for him. We worked on that for FP2. The start of the afternoon session seemed to be working reasonably well so, from a balance and set-up progress point of view, it's been okay. Unfortunately, as we got into the long-runs, we suffered some problems on both cars: Daniil had a braking issue of some sort at the rear, which has caused the rear brakes to get hot - we are currently investigating exactly what this is, but it's not something we've seen before, so we have to understand exactly what happened there and address it for tomorrow. For Carlos, he was unfortunately one of a number of drivers who went beyond the limits of the track today. Just as he was returning to the track, he caught the floor on quite an aggressive kerb and this unfortunately damaged the floor and the front area around the chassis. This meant it was sadly game over for him. We therefore didn't get the race data that we wanted; in terms of tyres we got some information, but not everything. It's a situation we've been in before, so I think we can make up for that. In terms of performance, there's definitely some work to do. It's all very close and we didn't get a clean run with either driver with the ultrasoft tyre at the beginning of the session, so we know there's a little bit more to come from that. Nevertheless, there's still some work to do and we will work on that tonight, targeting a bit more of a consistent day tomorrow."
Check out our Friday gallery from Spielberg, here.