22/10/2022
NEWS STORY
Pierre Gasly: "On paper we expected to struggle with this track, but our performance and speed in FP1 was really good. The car has been feeling better than the last two weekends, so we hope we can make another step forward tomorrow. I don't want to change the car too much, because the initial feeling is good, but FP3 will give us a chance to finetune specific places to extract more from the car, to allow us to hopefully fight for the top ten in Quali."
Yuki Tsunoda: "In FP1 we made some changes to the car to look at the balance, and I felt quite comfortable with this, so it looks like we're in quite a strong position heading into tomorrow. We'll have to adapt quite quickly in FP3, as the second session today was really an exhibition session, rather than just a carry on from FP1. It was however a useful session to learn more about the compounds for the future, so that will be helpful moving forward. I think the details are all on the table though from FP1, so I just need to put it altogether myself tomorrow and hopefully we can look to aim for Q3."
Jonathan Eddolls (Chief Race Engineer): "As we had the Pirelli tyre test in FP2, we had to try to complete two sessions worth of setup work and race tyre understanding in FP1, so it was a busy day! We started with rakes on both cars to gather important information to improve the correlation of our tools and aid development of the AT04. After removing these, we got into our test plan.
"The main aim today was understanding the trade-off of ride versus aero around this track, which in recent years has been the bumpiest of the season. The extensive resurfacing has removed many of the issues, so it was less of a challenge than in the past. As well as some mechanical and aero tests, we needed to see how the tyres would perform on Sunday. It's a high energy track and the degradation we saw today was significant, but similar across the various compounds, so we need to put the numbers together tonight and decide what the strategy looks like for Sunday.
"For FP2 we had the Pirelli tyre test with both of our cars - the run plans were defined by Pirelli and setup adjustments not allowed, so we simply progressed through the plan to help Pirelli define the 2023 tyres. Overall, it has been a positive day - the balance and setup were ballpark already from the first run in FP1 and the performance is in line with expectation, so we will continue with the tuning overnight with the aim to challenge for Q3 tomorrow."