28/09/2018
NEWS STORY
Paddy Lowe, Chief Technical Officer: We are back in Russia but it's a different time of year to last season and so it is cooler as a result. We have the same tyre compounds as Singapore, so they are very soft compounds for Sochi. This morning we had a reasonably intensive aero programme looking at some front wing geometry options and collecting some rake data. We were also looking at some rear wing levels for this weekend. Both cars flat-spotted one of their sets of tyres so that held us back a little bit, but we still got plenty of good data which we will go through tonight. In FP2 we had a much more normal session preparing for qualifying and the race. Both cars were struggling to get the most out of the tyres, but I think we have found something which should help with that and in the end, Sergey finished the session with a good long run on the prime tyre.
Sergey Sirotkin: We got lots of productive mileage today which is important but performance-wise, there's still a few things to squeeze out and maximise for tomorrow. There were some areas we found to be better than we first thought, so I think we look OK. There are a few more things to be optimised for tomorrow and you also don't know what the weather's going to do. I'm enjoying my home Grand Prix, it's been very busy but at the same time I've got so much support. I didn't expect so much. It's been difficult and busy to handle so many activities, but I've got to use this positive energy from the fans and put it into performance on the track.
Lance Stroll: We did plenty of consistent running, so it was just the usual Friday. At the end of FP1 I had a flat spot, so I just stopped because we had used all our planned tyres for that session. We look pretty slow, but tomorrow is another day so hopefully we can figure something out tonight and come back strong tomorrow.