01/09/2017
NEWS STORY
The first day of the Grand Prix on Ferrari's home turf resulted in two trouble free, albeit not fully straightforward, practice sessions for the two Scuderia drivers, who did their best to get familiar with the conditions of a track whose ultra-low levels of downforce make it a pretty unique event in the calendar.
Sebastian Vettel: "Today has been a mixed day and I hope tomorrow is going to be better. This afternoon for the first part of the session we mostly used Soft tires, but I am not entirely happy because we had a mixed run with a lot of traffic and the Virtual Safety Car period. So it hasn't been the ideal day you are normally looking for, but I guess it was the same for everyone. Overall, we should have enough data to go through now. If we can improve a couple of things tomorrow, then it should be better. Mercedes has been strong here during the last couple of years but we focus on ourselves. We try to improve the car because there's still a little bit missing and then we'll start from there."
Kimi Raikkonen: "It was not an easy day: for whatever reason, it was difficult to drive and put the car where I wanted. I was looking for a better balance overall. For sure we have some work to do for tomorrow, but that's a normal story on Friday. It's difficult to say something about the performance; it's only the first free practice, lap times don't mean much and we don't know what other people are doing. If we can get the car more to our liking, then we can improve and be faster."