22/09/2023
NEWS STORY
Dave Robson, Head of Vehicle Performance: We've had a good day here in Suzuka.
"It's always difficult to find the right compromises here and with the hot conditions, the tyres are under a lot of stress, which is causing high degradation. We haven't got the trade between low fuel and high fuel pace quite right yet but there are things that we can do to improve that overnight. Logan has driven well all day and as a result, both drivers have got a good understanding of the trades that they can make.
The conditions are likely to remain fairly stable for the next couple of days and so we are in a good position to improve the car. It is going to be close in qualifying and the race will require a lot of management, but we should be able to get ourselves into a strong position.
Alex Albon: It was okay today. As we expected, the low fuel pace feels good, it's the long run pace that we are struggling with, so we need to figure that out as the deg is high. We're going to go back to the drawing board a little bit; we might need to compromise our qualifying car a little bit for our race car, but let's see.
Logan Sargeant: It was really cool to drive in Suzuka for the first time but not easy at all particularly in Sector 1. There's a lot of work trying to dial in the car. I feel like it's not easy to get everything you need around here, so it's a work in progress but a good step forward from FP1 to FP2. From a driving point of view, I need to link the first sector up as it's where I'm losing the most time. From a car point of view, there's a few tweaks to try and have a better balance from low speed to high-speed. We've experienced quite high deg today and it hasn't been easy to have a consistent balance throughout the long runs. However, on low fuel runs the grip is high and feels pretty good.
Check out our Friday gallery from Suzuka here.