04/12/2020
NEWS STORY
Daniil Kvyat: "It was quite a standard Friday, we managed to complete all of our programme for today and worked through it pretty well. It was a new track to learn but I think we were quite OK out there. Hopefully, we will be able to understand a few more things tonight to see how we can improve tomorrow. It's extremely tight between the teams, so it's going to be important to get on top of everything without making any mistakes. It's a shorter track with new corners, which is always something I enjoy learning, and a different challenge that makes it very interesting."
Pierre Gasly: "It was a decent Friday. I think we have a pretty competitive car and we tried different setups which gave us a good idea of which direction to go for tomorrow. FP2 was a bit scrappy on my run on Options, so I think we have a bit more performance to come. However, the long runs look competitive, so it will just be a matter of fine-tuning and work on final details tonight to make sure we can start in a good position on Sunday and have a strong car for the race."
Jonathan Eddolls (Chief Race Engineer): "Although we're at the same venue as last week, we're facing different challenges this week as we're racing on an altered layout. While the circuit is a bit less demanding on the tyres, it's very hard on the cars, so even though effectively three of the corners are the same as last week, the aerodynamic requirement is quite different. We spent FP1 trying to understand the optimum configuration for the short run, which meant running some compares across the two cars, and at the end of the session, we started to get an initial understanding of tyre degradation. From a first look at the numbers, the degradation looked in a better position compared to last week. Moving on to FP2, we focused on setup work at the start of the session, then switched to long-runs to try and get a better understanding of tyre performance for Sunday. Things are looking positive so far; the short-run performance is good, and we managed to make some changes to the car to improve the long-run performance too, so it was a constructive day. Given that it's a short lap, one of the key points is certainly the traffic so I expect it's going to be a nightmare in Qualifying - we've already seen signs of it in practice - and Q1, in particular, is going to be a real challenge. We'll prepare ourselves tonight to be ready for it."
Check out our Friday gallery from Bahrain, here.