25/08/2017
NEWS STORY
Sahara Force India completed a busy day of practice in preparation for this weekend's Belgian Grand Prix.
Esteban Ocon: "The day was reasonably clean and tidy and I managed to cover a lot of laps - even with the red flag and the rain shower in second practice. The feeling with the car is already pretty good and things look promising for a strong performance tomorrow. This track is very impressive in a Formula One car and, as we expected, I was able to take Eau Rouge flat on my first lap."
Sergio Perez: "The morning session was compromised a little bit with a few small issues. We were changing a lot of things on the car so I didn't do a huge amount of laps - not as many as we would have liked. The afternoon was better and I was beginning to find a good feeling with the car. The important thing is that we know where we need to work and the direction we need to take. So I'm feeling confident we will be in better shape tomorrow. As Esteban has shown, the pace of the car is quite competitive and we have a good opportunity to qualify well tomorrow."
Otmar Szafnauer: "It has been a fairly typical Spa Friday with a red flag this morning and heavy rain this afternoon. We started the day with both our cars out on track nice and early to allow us to progress with the test programme we had planned. The red flag compromised things slightly and Sergio didn't have the smoothest session with some downtime in the garage. In the afternoon we thought the rain was coming and so we prioritised our runs to ensure we collected the most important tyre data with the race in mind. We're not expecting much more rain over the weekend, but in Spa you can never predict the weather with a huge amount of confidence. The drivers are generally happy with the car balance, but there are some areas we can improve overnight which will give us more performance heading into qualifying."
Check out our Friday gallery from Spa, here.