01/07/2022
NEWS STORY
Yuki Tsunoda: "I enjoyed driving the new car here for the first time today, it's always a challenging circuit with high-speed corners but with the new car it was really exciting - especially through Maggotts and Becketts, you can push even more than last year's car and you slide around a lot. Overall, it's been a bit of an unusual day compared to most race weeks, as we had almost no running in FP1 with the rain. I feel like we've only really had one session, so it's a bit weird, but we still managed to complete all the running we needed to this afternoon. We're currently struggling a lot with the car and we're quite far away from other teams at the moment. We were always expecting it to be more difficult this weekend, but we'll need to take a big step to be able to be competitive in Qualifying. It looks like the conditions will be tricky tomorrow, so we need to look at all the data tonight and be able to adapt to whatever the British weather throws at us."
Pierre Gasly: "We damaged some parts of the car quite early on today, which made things even harder for us, but generally we're just lacking quite a lot of pace. We're struggling in high-speed corners and unfortunately this is a track that has many of them. Based on these track characteristics, this weekend was always going to be tough, but we'll work hard tonight and see what we can do to improve. We need to be on top of our game and try to make some steps forward, so that we can be in the best position for Sunday. It's also maybe raining tomorrow, which wouldn't be a bad thing for us, we obviously can't rely on this though, so we'll work hard tonight to find a bit more performance for Quali."
Jonathan Eddolls (Chief Race Engineer): "Today we enjoyed some typical British weather, with two thirds of the track wet and one third close to dry in FP1. This meant overall it was too dry to do any decent running on an Inter without killing it, but it was equally too wet for a dry tyre. So, there was little to learn in FP1, which meant we needed to compress all our planned running into FP2. We split the cars in terms of tyre allocation with the view of understanding the best tyres for the race. In FP2 we struggled with both cars in terms of overall grip and balance - neither driver was happy, and we could see some issues in the data. These issues were confirmed when the cars came back to the garage with extensive damage to various aero components. We were able to survive and keep the cars on track, but the performance was far from where we were expecting and where it should be. We have a lot of work ahead of us tonight to confirm the reasons for this and to make the relevant changes for tomorrow. Currently it's also looking like the weather tomorrow could be mixed, so potentially we have completed all of the possible dry running we will get ahead of Qualifying and the race. We therefore need to put everything together and focus on supplying the drivers with a more competitive car from FP3 onwards."
Check out our Friday gallery from Silverstone here.