29/07/2022
NEWS STORY
Pierre Gasly: "I was pretty happy with my lap and managed to put a good one together in FP2. In terms of performance, we are not there yet. We are sliding too much, so we will have to see what we can change by tomorrow to be faster. There isn't a massive issue with the balance, and I felt like I was really on the limit, putting a clean lap together, but the time does not seem to reflect that, so we will need to analyse it tonight. Based on the forecast it will be wet tomorrow for Qualifying, which are conditions I enjoy driving in. Hopefully we find some solutions to improve the car, but a bit of rain wouldn't be a bad thing for us."
Yuki Tsunoda: "Today feels like quite a step-back since France, where the car was performing quite well. Here in Hungary, the balance of the car is not ideal, I'm really struggling with it a lot, so we need to go away with the engineers tonight and find out what the issue is, so we can improve for tomorrow. It's looking like it'll rain for Quali, I'm not quite sure how I feel about that yet, it really depends on what we're able to learn overnight and how much more pace we can find in FP3."
Jonathan Eddolls (Chief Race Engineer): "We've arrived in Hungary already prepared, with a lot of learnings on how our new aero package performs on track from last week in France. So, we adapted the setup to suit this circuit and then had a number of tests to conduct across the two cars to improve the balance. In FP1 we ran the Hard and Soft tyres - the Hard had much less grip than expected and therefore the step-in grip to Softs was big, so we didn't maximise the performance on the first push. The hard performance was also evident on the long run in FP1. The track was very hot and with the tyre energies at the Hungaroring the tyres were having a hard time, therefore the degradation was high. For FP2 the changes were aimed at fixing these issues. We were unable to find the expected increase in grip on the Soft tyre, so we need to understand why this was the case and update the setup for tomorrow to address it. The performance we have shown today is not in line with our expectations, so we have a lot of work to do tonight. Tomorrow there are some questions marks over the weather, which means this could be the last dry running before the race. In any case, we will keep pushing to understand the limitations and try to make improvements for the rest of the weekend."
Check out our Friday gallery from the Hungaroring here.