17/05/2024
NEWS STORY
Yuki Tsunoda: "I'm feeling good. It's been a very positive and consistent day for us straight from FP1, and I'm excited for the coming days of our home race.
"Returning to a normal weekend again, I feel more comfortable and less stressed because we know we have time to progress and build up our laps. At the same time, the performance was there straight away. Now we just continue progressing from session to session, put it all together and maximise the car package. So far, top ten is likely but anything can happen and the midfield remains very tight, so we need to stay sharp. We're obviously aiming for the highest position possible but at the same time, just try to focus and extract the performance of the car."
Daniel Ricciardo: "I'm glad to get back to the normal format of the weekend. On this first day, compared to other times when I finished P11 and I felt the lap was a good one, this time, it didn't really feel right. I'm still trying to find lap time around here; I struggled in a few corners and certainly, there are a few things in the setup that we're trying to improve. We'll do a few more tweaks tonight, and I feel like another practice tomorrow will be good just to make some setup changes to improve in a few areas that I know we can. I'm still positive as I think we're looking all right, which Yuki showed by having a good day with a great lap in FP2. Also, who knows what everyone else will do but the aim is to be a strong Q3 car."
Alan Permane (Racing Director): "It's been a little bit of a mixed day for us. Starting with Yuki, he was happy with his car from the very first lap of the day and has really built on that and his confidence. We ran all three tyre compounds today and he set his fastest lap on the softs midway through FP2 and was generally happy with the car. As always, there are some little things to look at tonight, to tweak and improve even more for FP3 and qualifying tomorrow. Daniel on the other hand wasn't that happy and complained about oversteering in the first laps of the morning. That's been improved and he's generally getting happier with the car. There's still work to do, but we'll analyse things tonight and get him up and closer to the front of the grid, and with that, we can aim to get both cars into Q3 tomorrow afternoon."
Check out our Friday gallery from Imola here.