08/06/2018
NEWS STORY
Lewis finished today's morning session in P2 with Valtteri in P5. In the afternoon, Lewis came home in P4 with Valtteri in P6.
Lewis Hamilton: It's been a beautiful day, the weather has been fantastic and the track feels better than ever. It's such a fun track to drive and we didn't have any problems, I really enjoyed it. A lot of fans came out as well so it's been a nice Friday. The fact that we now have an additional DRS zone in Montreal means that we can think about running more wing this year. In previous years we would run a low downforce setting here, whereas now it's kind of normal, so the car feels great through the corners. Straight out of the box today I think we started right with the car set-up. There were some things that we needed to adjust along the way making small incremental changes, from one time-out to another it always felt a bit different, but it's been good. I believe that the gap in the time sheets is down to the different tyre choices today, but we will find out tomorrow. Hopefully we'll get a good feeling when we first take the HyperSofts for a spin in FP3 tomorrow and it's not too different to what we've been driving today.
Valtteri Bottas: It was a good day here in Montreal even though it may not look that strong on the time sheets for us. Ferrari and Red Bull were running the HyperSoft tyres which we will only start using tomorrow so that's why our times didn't look that good today. So we should be there or thereabouts. Of course our competitors have a bit of an advantage with the new engines, but I think it will be a close qualifying tomorrow. The track was very dirty today, as soon you go off the line you lose a lot of grip for the next half a lap or so. So we need to be very precise when we drive around the track, especially through the chicanes. I think we've learned a thing or two from Monaco about the HyperSofts, so hopefully we can make them work tomorrow. The balance of the car was really good from the start today, so we only had to do some fine tuning. The car felt good straight out of the garage. Tomorrow we will find out how good it is.
Andrew Shovlin: Overall we've had a fairly straightforward day, the car has run reliably and it was just the red flags and virtual safety cars that caused us to have to adapt the plan a little. The car balance has been good from the first run so it has just been a case of small balance tuning to keep the car in the right window as the track grip came up. It's difficult to judge our single lap pace from today as we haven't run the HyperSoft and some of our closest competition looked to have had less than perfect sessions. However, comparing on the same tyres, we do look to be in better shape than we were in Monaco. The long runs seem consistent, with the tyres behaving normally although as always, Ferrari and Red Bull look to be very similar pace and we'll need to wait until Sunday to see how we actually stack up.