26/04/2019
NEWS STORY
Both drivers did not set a time in FP1 as the session was suspended after 12 minutes owing to track repairs. Lewis came home third in the afternoon session with Valtteri in P5.
Lewis Hamilton: It's been a bit of an odd day, but I still enjoyed it. FP2 went really well, I was feeling good out there and I was more comfortable in the car than I was last year. However, the Ferraris are clearly very quick and it looks like they're quite a bit ahead of us, so we'll need to investigate to see where we are losing time compared to them. It's unlikely that we will find seven tenths over night, but we'll do everything we can to push the car in the right direction. Our long run pace looked a little bit stronger than our short run pace, so we'll need to try and find out why. It should be a good fight tomorrow; I'm always down for a fight and I think that's what the fans want to see, so I'm looking forward to tomorrow.
Valtteri Bottas: It's been a fairly disrupted day which made FP2 more important than usual. We tried to maximise the time on track, adding a few more laps to our original plan for the afternoon after FP1 was suspended. I'm not really pleased with the laps I did, but it's always a bit tricky to find the rhythm in Baku and it takes a bit of time. It wasn't easy to get the Medium compound up to the right temperatures today, but corner speeds will increase due to track evolution, so we should be able to get a bit more energy into the tyres tomorrow. Our long runs felt good and the pace didn't look too bad either, but we are a bit behind on single lap pace. Ferrari looked really strong, particularly on the short runs, so it will be a tough fight tomorrow.
James Allison: This isn't an easy track at the best of times, but made more complex by losing the whole of FP1. Nevertheless, FP2 went smoothly; we managed to get a good look at both tyres and a quick check of rear wing level as well with Lewis. We're not where we need to be lap for the single lap work, but looked reasonably paced for the longer runs. So we have a bit of work to do overnight to tidy up the handling to give the drivers the confidence to really smash it around the lap and then hopefully we'll have a good weekend.
Check out our Friday gallery from Baku, here.