10/05/2019
NEWS STORY
Renault F1 Team began preparations for this weekend's Emirates Spanish Grand Prix today at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.
Nico Hulkenberg ended the day as the team's quicker driver, posting a 1min 18.861secs in the afternoon session with team-mate Daniel Ricciardo 0.073secs down on his time.
Both drivers enjoyed promising long run pace with Nico driving 43 laps and Daniel 40 laps in Free Practice 2.
Nico Hulkenberg: "Today was quite a standard Friday with nothing too special to report. We did the usual mix of short and long runs across both sessions as well as some tyre assessment. As always around here, we were chasing the balance of the car and we have some work to do in that area. The car didn't feel perfect today and we have some room for improvement looking ahead to tomorrow's qualifying."
Daniel Ricciardo: "There was a lot learned today. I felt the car was pretty good to start the day and better than what we showed on the timesheets. There is more potential and we have some work to do to identify why we couldn't demonstrate that pace over one lap. That said, it seemed better on the high-fuel runs. Tomorrow, we'll look to extract better qualifying pace."
Nick Chester, Chassis Technical Director: "In FP1, we evaluated some new aero components. In FP2 we completed our usual short and long run comparisons of tyre compounds. Our short run pace and car balance wasn't where we wanted to be, so that's an area for assessment overnight. However, our long runs, especially on the Medium tyre, looked better. We have some pace to find on short runs ahead of FP3 and qualifying tomorrow."