02/09/2022
NEWS STORY
Round 15 of the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship commenced on Friday with practice at Circuit Zandvoort as teams prepared for Sunday's 72-lap Dutch Grand Prix.
The opening session, FP1, ran for 60-minutes with Mick Schumacher and Kevin Magnussen kicking off with installation laps in their respective VF-22s on the Pirelli P Zero White hard tire. Baseline outings on the Red soft tires followed on the run-plan. Both drivers duly delivered their fastest laps on the softer rubber, Schumacher producing a 1:14.163 for P11, while Magnussen claimed P13 on the timesheet with a best lap of 1:14.405. FP1 concluded with the drivers sampling their used softs on high-fuel - both cars running laps through to the checkered flag.
FP2 commenced with a sampling of the Yellow medium rubber across both VF-22s. Qualifying sims were next on the agenda with a return to fresh sets of soft tires. Schumacher posted a fastest lap of 1:13.604 for P13 with Magnussen's best a 1:14.282 to place P19. Long-distance, high-fuel runs wrapped up Friday practice at the 4.259-kilometer (2.646-mile), 14-turn circuit.
Haas F1 Team ran a total of 112 laps on Friday across FP1 and FP2 - 56 each by Schumacher and Magnussen.
Kevin Magnussen: "It was great. It's a really cool track and it's really challenging as well, so it's nice that we go to places like Zandvoort where you really feel exhilarated, and that's certainly the case. I'm looking forward to getting some more laps in tomorrow, I'll sleep on the laps I got today, and get more out of it tomorrow."
Mick Schumacher: "I'd call it a clean day. The car felt good from the get-go, and it was definitely nicer to drive compared to Spa plus it's a bit more competitive which is nice. I love coming here, it's such a pure, old school racing track and you really have to drive the car around here, instead of the car driving you around. It's definitely a good, fun place to drive a lap but maybe in the race it's going to be a bit more tough as overtaking is still a bit difficult it seems, but for sure we'll have a lot of action compared to last year."
Guenther Steiner, Team Principal: "Maybe a slightly more positive Friday than we had last weekend. FP1 was productive for both Kevin and Mick with lots of laps - good for Kevin especially given it's his first time driving a Formula 1 car around Zandvoort. Our times were more competitive on the soft tires which was inline with our expectations coming here. We didn't quite replicate that form in FP2 later in the day, at least not with both cars, but we got to complete our run through of all the tire compounds by running the mediums before our quali sims. Work to do based on what we've learned, as always, but we're on a solid footing heading into Saturday."
Check out our Friday gallery from Zandvoort here.