12/07/2019
NEWS STORY
Carlos Sainz: "It's been a good day for the team. Another strong Friday making it to the top 10 in both sessions, so happy with that because it's always encouraging. The team at the factory have been pushing hard and we've managed to bring a couple of upgrades here. They are still to be evaluated after today's sessions, but they seemed to work properly. We need to look carefully into the data gathered today if we want to perform at a high level tomorrow, so no time to waste."
Lando Norris: "Tricky sessions today. The wind is quite gusty, which makes the car quite unpredictable. It's easy to make mistakes in a few of the corners. The new tarmac seems to be getting better in some ways but there are still some bumps and small things here and there that can catch you out. So, not easy - but I think we managed to do most of the plan, including a good amount of longer runs. We've got a good idea where to improve the car from the runs we did today. Although it was tricky, we still did everything we needed to do."
Andrea Stella, Performance Director: "Silverstone is always an interesting challenge for drivers and for the engineers. You have to set up the car to be good in both the high-speed and low-speed sections. Especially in the low-speed, there are some long corners which are very important for lap-time, so you need to find the right compromise, and this is not straightforward. Additionally, there was a lot of wind today which made the car quite tricky to drive. Overall, the balance of the car wasn't perfect: we have some work to do to make the drivers more comfortable and exploit the performance of the car.
"As usual, Friday is a busy day and we tried some new parts, which we still have to evaluate properly. Once we have completed that analysis, we will make a call on how we progress with both cars for tomorrow.
"Another interesting element at Silverstone this year is the new tarmac, which meant that we lost some of the references to the past. Certainly, understanding tyre behaviour will be one of the main tasks overnight, in preparation for qualifying and the race. Overall, it's been a positive day as we could go through our programme without problems or delays. We collected a lot of data that we will analyse overnight, and hopefully be able to improve the balance of the car and get the maximum out of this important weekend for our team."
Check out our Friday gallery from Silverstone, here.