10/05/2019
NEWS STORY
Daniil Kvyat: "It was a productive Friday. We completed many laps today without any big issues and we were able to gather some useful data, which we will analyse tonight to find the best setup for tomorrow. I'm positive that we'll make a step, which is very important in such a tight midfield where every tenth matters."
Alexander Albon: "Bringing updates means that it might take some time to understand how to make them work in the best possible way, and this is exactly what happened today in FP1. We analysed all the data before starting today's second session and FP2 was much more productive - we made a good step. It's progress but there's still some more work to do tomorrow. We're in the ballpark and the pace still looks quite strong."
Jonathan Eddolls (Chief Race Engineer): "It was a fairly standard trouble-free Friday. We've brought some updates to Spain and spent a good part of FP1 evaluating them to see if they were behaving as expected. In FP1 we struggled a bit to find the best balance as we were still learning about the behaviour of the car. It took some time to understand which made the first session a bit tricky, especially for Alex. Between sessions, we studied all the data and we could see how to maximise the potential of the new parts, so we made some fairly big changes heading into FP2 looking to optimise the car, which sent us in the right direction. In FP2 we completed some further tests, then made small changes to get the car well balanced for the option tyre. In the long runs, we did a prime/base compare - the prime tyre looked to perform pretty well and the base was robust, but we still have to go through the data tonight to find the best strategy for the race."
Toyoharu Tanabe (Honda F1 Technical Director): "Everything went smoothly on the PU side at Scuderia Toro Rosso today. All four of our cars were running Spec 1 PUs today and it was planned to change all of them for Spec 2 tonight for the rest of the weekend. Therefore, we will just carry on with our usual tasks, working on set-up for qualifying and the race."