17/11/2023
NEWS STORY
Yuki Tsunoda: "It's a shame for the fans that FP1 wasn't restarted, but safety comes first.
"It took some time for FP2 to start, but in the end, we got to drive for 90 minutes and were able to collect valuable data. The track surface is quite slippery, but I enjoy the track layout itself, especially the kerbs because they're drivable and you can be quite aggressive, which is fun. Our performance doesn't seem great so far, but we gathered a lot of data today, so I'm sure we can make some positive steps forward. We have an idea of some limitations and have already tried ways to improve them, particularly in the long run, and it definitely feels better already. We'll work together and do our best to extract the maximum performance from our package."
Daniel Ricciardo: "It was a long day on a very low-grip track. FP2 started later than originally scheduled, but these things happen sometimes. We had a fairly smooth session and learnt a lot of things throughout it. As it's a new track, especially a street circuit, it took more time to feel comfortable, so you always need to take a bit more margin as mistakes can be more costly. After some changes to the long run, it looks stronger, and after we refine some limitations tonight, I don't think we'll be far off the pace for qualifying tomorrow, so I'm sure if we put it all together, we can aim to make it to Q3."
Jonathan Eddolls (Chief Race Engineer): "With very little running in FP1, we were able to carry the tyres across to FP2 and conduct a 90-minute session with four available sets, so it was a busy session. Being a new track, the key points we worked on were understanding the tyre behaviour and how to extract the most from them and then optimising the downforce level for this track. The graining on the tyres was the biggest issue, more so on the softer compounds. We expect this to improve by the race, but we still need to see what else we can do with the setup to reduce the impact. It's not an easy choice regarding the downforce level because you want minimum drag with the very long straights, but with the low grip in the corners, you need more load. We tried a couple of options and will review the data overnight to see what we can learn from others in order to make the optimum choice from FP3 onwards. The short-run pace was not where we expected it to be, so there is some work to do tonight to improve that, but having said that, we appeared more competitive on the longer runs. With the later FP2 session time, we have less time available until the curfew to analyse the data, but we'll do all we can to work on setup changes and improve the performance for tomorrow."
Check out our Friday gallery from Las Vegas here.