11/09/2020
NEWS STORY
Pierre Gasly: "Overall, it was a strong Friday as we finished both sessions in the top 10. It was quite impressive and very enjoyable to drive these F1 cars on such a track with so many high-speed corners, it was very cool! I didn't feel fully comfortable in the car, so we'll make some changes for tomorrow to find a bit more performance and get more out of our package."
Daniil Kvyat: "It was OK today. We're at a new circuit and it's definitely a cool track and it was great fun to drive. We were able to learn a lot and put a good number of laps in, trying to discover what's best for the car here, as you need a good car balance in order to have confidence. I think we have some room for improvement for tomorrow and we'll do our best to achieve it."
Jonathan Eddolls (Chief Race Engineer): "We're at the third race of the triple-header which is hard on the team, although everyone received a massive boost with the fantastic result at the last event. The celebrations were fairly short-lived as we come to a new track in Formula 1 racing. We've never been to this track in this era of F1, so there was a lot of preparation to do in a short time between Monza and Mugello.
"We continued the AT01 development here, so compared to the car we had in Monza, we've got new components both on the aero and mechanical side. As this a new track, we aimed to give the drivers as much running as possible but that, combined with trying to evaluate our new components, made FP1 a busy session. We found a good compromise to gather all the data we needed, as well as giving the engineers time to find the optimum balance. FP1 was positive, we were fairly happy and everything appeared to be working as expected. FP2 was a bit more of a conventional session, ultimately it was about understanding Qualifying performance, but also evaluating the tyres over the long runs.
"Pierre had a positive session and showed good performance, while Dany struggled a little bit more with the balance and grip on his car, particularly on the option tyre. He wasn't able to extract the maximum potential neither over the short nor the long run, so we have a bit more work to do on his car to understand why he was struggling with the handling. We have a good amount of work to do tonight to give him a car that can be competitive and fight to get into Q3 tomorrow. We will also be focusing on tyre behaviour to allow us to make the best choice for the race strategy on Sunday."
Check out our Friday gallery from Mugello, here.