23/03/2018
NEWS STORY
Sergio Perez: "We achieved a lot today. There were a lot of new parts on the car and we needed to learn quickly. It's only Friday and I think we can find more performance before qualifying. That's always been our strength as a team and we need to work hard tonight understanding the data. I said during testing that all the teams are much closer together and if you look at the times it's certainly the case. We need to be perfect in qualifying because a small mistake will drop you a long way back."
Esteban Ocon: "For the first day of the season it was actually quite a normal day of practice. We had a lot of things to try on the car, but everything went to plan. It was all about learning and understanding the directions we need to take with the new package. We have already seen a step forward in performance compared to testing, but there' is obviously some tuning to be done. The afternoon session was a bit frustrating because of the red flag and I always seemed to be stuck in traffic. Tomorrow is what counts, though, so we need to make sure we are ready and do our homework tonight."
Robert Fernley: "A solid start for us in Melbourne. The main job was fitting all the new aero parts to the car and starting to understand how to get the most from them. We made good progress with that and also worked through the usual tyre evaluation programme. Both sessions went pretty smoothly and we have lots of data to help us make the right decisions tonight. It was a shame that the red flag interrupted both drivers during their performance runs, but fortunately it was only a short disruption. It's clearly very tight in the midfield and a tenth here and there will make a huge difference in qualifying. It's hard to know exactly where we stand just yet and I wouldn't want to make any predictions for qualifying."
Check out our Friday gallery from Melbourne, here.