24/11/2023
NEWS STORY
Daniel Ricciardo: "I think it was a solid day. I definitely felt the positives from the upgrades immediately in FP1, and we could see the benefits from it.
"We made some changes for FP2, trying to exploit it and get the best all-round package. It was a slightly disrupted session, so we were a little compromised with our programme, but I'm sure others were too. Looking at us, I'm confident we can find even more performance, so I'm not too concerned about our positions in FP2. We did look like we had a decent pace on the medium tyres, so I think we'll be a top-ten car if we get it right."
Yuki Tsunoda: "Overall, today was a positive day. We collected a lot of data about the upgrades we brought here and learnt a lot of things. I feel a clear difference and we've definitely made a positive step in performance. There are still a couple of things to do and finetune to put it all together, but I already noticed the steps we made between FP1 and FP2. This will hopefully let us fight in Q3 tomorrow, and I think it's possible. We'll use this opportunity and maximise it."
Jonathan Eddolls (Chief Race Engineer): "With the continuous development of the AT04 and to help gather useful information for next year, we brought a few updates to the season finale here in Abu Dhabi. The focus of FP1 was to evaluate that these were working as expected and then start to understand how to balance around them. With 10 rookie drivers in other cars in FP1, it wasn't as straightforward to know where everyone was in terms of performance, but the signs were promising for us because, from the data, our updates appeared to be working as expected. Running was very limited in FP2 because of the multiple Red Flags. We managed to get the short-run data on the medium and soft compound tyres but not the usual long-run tyre information across the two cars. This will make the tyre choice for Sunday's race a little bit more difficult than usual. A positive factor is that this is a track where we test, so we still have good data from last year to help our choice. With the way the weekend has panned out, the final classification in FP2 doesn't exactly represent where we expect to be in qualifying tomorrow, but we have enough data to understand the limitations and to work on changes to the setup overnight."
Check out our Friday gallery from Yas Marina here.