24/08/2018
NEWS STORY
The first day of practice after the mandatory summer break went smoothly for Scuderia Ferrari and its drivers. Both Kimi and Seb topped the time sheets in P2 and P1 respectively and the two SF71Hs, on which several new Power Unit components had been fitted, went through a full program of aero comparison, set-up changes and tyre evaluation on both fast laps and long runs.
Kimi Raikkonen: That was our first day of practice after the break; we did our pretty usual job to get a feeling for the car once again. I enjoy driving on this track, it has a good flow and this generation of cars are pretty nice to drive here. I think Spa is a great circuit, but obviously this doesn't make you faster or slower! We always say that Friday is Friday and times don't really matter today; it was ok, but for sure we still have some work ahead of us. Tomorrow we'll try to do our best and see where we end up. We expected some rain today but it did not come. But the weather can still be a key point this weekend, as it changes very quickly here.
Sebastian Vettel: Overall, I think it's going the right way. Today it was a bit difficult to figure out where we are and I think we'll have to wait for tomorrow to have a better idea. The new engine has done what it was supposed to do. Today everything was working well. Now we'll see about tomorrow: rain shouldn't give us any more problems and, should we have wet conditions, it would be quite nice to have confirmation that we found the right things to do. On this track everything seems to happen faster, so it should be a lot of fun and if we have dry conditions tomorrow for qualifying, we should be ok. There are still some special tracks on the calendar and for sure this one in Spa is very exciting in terms of cornering speeds. We still need to do some work, but we have time to do it.
Check out our Friday gallery from Spa, here.