02/07/2021
NEWS STORY
Yuki Tsunoda: "We've had a decent day and are happy that we've maintained the pace from last week. We have worked hard on our longer running, as that was something we found we struggled with during the race, and I think this has been really positive. They weren't the easiest conditions out there, the circuit is much colder this week and then we had some rain towards the end of FP2. My main objective today was to gather as much data as possible ahead of Qualifying and the race, by slowly building up my lap times and I've achieved that without making any mistakes, so I'm pleased with that."
Pierre Gasly: "I was playing catch-up a little bit today, having missed FP2 last time out and obviously the race, so we spent time working on our long-runs and trying to understand the tyres. I think there were a lot of positives today and the pace is still there. However, we were slightly struggling in these different conditions, so we have a few things to look at tonight with the engineers and then we can make some changes for tomorrow."
Jonathan Eddolls (Chief Race Engineer): "We were able to show that the car was competitive at this track during last weekend's race and the post-race analysis highlighted some areas where we felt we could improve the car and balance even further, so this formed part of the learning process during the morning session. In addition, we have available a compound of tyre that is one step softer this weekend, so we needed to understand how to maximise its performance over the short-run, then the life and degradation over a long-run. On top of that, each driver had an additional two sets of Prototypes, which we needed to use to gather data for Pirelli and ourselves, in preparation for their introduction in Silverstone. FP1 was a very busy session, but we were able to show a good performance and the new tyre appeared to work well. Pierre didn't have a clean run on his Softs, so there was room to improve for FP2. The temperatures were quite different to last week and this had an impact on the tyres, so moving into FP2 we did some fine-tuning and again the drivers did a good job over the short-runs. The longer stints were more of a challenge, especially given the very light rain for the last 15 minutes of the session. We appeared to have more degradation than our competitors, so this will be the area we need to spend the most time analysing tonight."
Check out our Friday gallery from Spielberg, here.