15/09/2017
NEWS STORY
Carlos Sainz: "After sitting out in this afternoon's FP1, I obviously had to take my time to get used to driving here in FP2 – I had to do some extra laps at the beginning to make sure I recovered the lost time. I think we still haven't recovered it fully but we have until tomorrow before qualifying to be ready and I'm confident we will get there. For the rest, I'm happy with my performance in today's session. We still need to understand a few things we've introduced on the car for this race a bit better because at the moment we're not 100% sure, but we will work hard overnight to solve this. Bring on tomorrow!"
Daniil Kvyat: "A decent Friday, we did a good job today. Of course, we still have some work to do regarding the car balance and hopefully we will fix this for tomorrow in order to improve our pace a little bit more. A part from that, we can be happy with our start to the weekend, we managed to complete plenty of laps and we now have enough information to make a step forward tomorrow."
Sean Gelael: "What a great experience to drive in an FP1 session and be so close to home! It's an amazing feeling. Singapore is one of the toughest tracks on the calendar and at the start it was still a bit damp as well, so it wasn't the most ideal to my F1 career, but in the end we managed well. I enjoyed it a lot out there and we were able to complete the programme, which is positive. Obviously, I'd like to be closer to Daniil, but that will be more of a target further on in the season. I'm happy with my performance today and I'd like to thank the team and everyone supporting me for this opportunity. I now look forward to my next FP1 outing in Malaysia in two weeks' time!"
Jody Egginton (Head of Vehicle Performance): "In today's FP1 we had Sean Gelael in the car, together with Daniil. We had some big test items to get through and both drivers completed their programmes. Sean did a really good job, followed a consistent approach to his driving, gave us some good feedback and we managed to get useful data on a couple of test items. With Daniil, we did a bit more set-up work and we ended the session reasonably happy with the baseline set-up on both cars, even though it was clear that we still had some more work to do to make the next step into FP2. For the evening session we had Carlos back in the car, so he was playing catch-up. He conducted some longer runs just to get familiar with the car and the circuit again, which he completed without any fuss. Daniil was focusing on some of the changes we'd made over the break and I think it's fair to say that with both drivers we didn't really get the best out of the car and the set-up wasn't quite right for the short run. We then moved to the long runs and again we're not entirely happy with where we are today but we've got a good idea of what we're going to do tonight. We're confident we'll make a step forward tomorrow and try and get the car a bit more solidly into the top ten, which we believe it has the potential to do here."
Check out our Friday gallery from Singapore, here.