25/08/2017
NEWS STORY
Carlos Sainz: "It's been a good day for us. We were a bit quicker than what we all expected before coming here, which is positive. On the other hand, we know that on Saturdays our competitors normally do a bigger step than us, so we need to keep an eye on them if we want to stay inside the top ten, but I'm happy with how we've started the weekend. Regarding the crazy weather, it doesn't surprise me, this is Spa! This is the seventh time I race here and every time I've come this kind of thing happens, where it's sunny one moment and the other it starts to rain... It's typical from here and you just need to be ready for anything - I wouldn't mind a bit of this tomorrow or Sunday!"
Daniil Kvyat: "A decent Friday. We were able to get plenty running in even though we had a few issues throughout the day - we will recover for tomorrow. FP3 will definitely be a busy one, but we know what we're missing and what we need to do, so I'm confident we can end up doing a good job tomorrow and I look forward to the rest of the weekend."
James Key (Technical Director): "A little bit of mix fortunes today for the drivers. We had a reasonably straight-forward couple of sessions with Carlos - he was quite happy with the car from the start and we hit our targets with some of our set-up parameters for him. He looked reasonably good in FP1 and we were all quite happy with the performance. Nevertheless, we needed to make some changes for FP2 to make some further steps and see if we could attack some of the weaknesses we felt we had. We did this and generally seemed to go in the right direction; Carlos did a good job and gave clear feedback, so that was a positive day for him. Sadly, when the rain came we missed the opportunity - as did everyone else - to understand the crucial race information for these tyres. Regarding Daniil, not such a smooth ride... We had a few issues on his car, which meant that he wasn't quite in the window that we expected for some of the set-up plans that we had for him, so we had to tune that out before we could begin to make progress. Considering that was the case also in FP1, he looked quite competitive knowing that he wasn't entirely happy with the way the car was feeling for him, so that was also a good job for him. We then needed to make slightly bigger changes in FP2 - some of those changes appeared to give the desired effect, but we didn't attack all the problems as well as we hoped, so there's definitely more work to be done there. Unfortunately, his FP2 was compromised by some problems with the car, which we apologise to him for; it's something we can see in the data but that's not easily fixable in the session, so, sadly, we didn't get to run the full programme to asses more set-up changes. We missed out there a bit but we'll fix the problems overnight. However although we have work to do the underlying performance seem ok at present and we will work on both cars to make the steps needed for tomorrow."
Check out our Friday gallery from Spa, here.