Quotes after Styrian GP Friday Practice

Fast man Max Verstappen

Red Bull

Max Verstappen
“The car already feels better than last week, the balance is a lot nicer to drive and we have made a good step. It is only Friday Practice and of course it is too early to say how we are looking against Mercedes, but from our side I think we are quite happy. We have tried a few different directions to understand the car a bit more and I think we are heading the right way which I’m pleased about. We have to see what will happen tomorrow with the weather but otherwise we will find out where we really are on Sunday. Normally our race pace is more competitive but already over one lap we can’t complain and actually the 11 laps I did in last week’s race didn’t look too bad, so it can only get better. Even if tomorrow the weather is too bad for qualifying I expect we will still have Sunday morning to do it, so I don’t expect to be on pole position with this lap."

Alex Albon
“We’ve been getting a bit creative and trying some different things compared to last week’s running here, some of the changes worked and some didn’t, so it’s a bit of a mixed day. The weather for tomorrow is obviously a bit of an unknown so let’s see what happens and if we’re even driving, as every time it’s rained here it’s been a monsoon. We’ll still treat tonight like any other Friday though and look over the data to see what we can learn ahead of tomorrow. Late in the session I pushed a bit too much on the exit of the corner, nothing serious, and lost the rear. Max obviously had a good session and is comfortable with the car so hopefully we can learn a little bit from his side of the garage and take a step forward."

Mercedes

Can Bottas win again?

Valtteri Bottas
It was a very useful day of practice. We had quite a few things to try after last weekend. FP1 was mainly looking into whether we had fixed the reliability concerns from last Sunday. The team is still looking into that, but I think we have made some progress. We made some good set-up tweaks and I tried to use the learnings from last weekend, in terms of one-lap pace and driving style over a race distance. We are all getting to know this track pretty well now, but still it's always good fun to be on track here. I still feel really good in the car, which is good news, but in the end the next two days are the ones that count.

Lewis Hamilton
It felt relatively normal out there today, but the pace was quite far off, so we have a lot of work to do this evening to try and figure out why. I was feeling good in FP1 and the start of FP2 felt pretty good too, but then it started to drop off. Others out there looked quick and Valtteri has good pace. It seems like the field is bunching up a bit more, but it's always tough to read into what happened in practice. We've got some work to do, to look into the data and find out what's going on. Hopefully tomorrow we'll be in a better position. It looks set to be wet tomorrow, but it's fun to be out there in those conditions so hopefully we can still drive in the rain.

Andrew Shovlin
It's been a busy week in the factory trying to understand and produce a solution for the electrical issues we had throughout last weekend. New looms arrived in time for the car build on Wednesday and they ran successfully today. We'd like a bit more running before we conclude that it's resolved, but it certainly seems to have improved our situation. On today's program, first practice was quite straightforward. We had a few test items on the car, along with some high-downforce parts in preparation for Budapest. The second session wasn't so simple. We'd all received an email from Michael Masi at the FIA to say that the lap times for FP2 could be used to make up the grid, in the unlikely event we cannot run on Saturday or Sunday morning. That meant everyone was trying a bit harder, so we dropped the fuel a bit and pulled another set of Softs from Saturday to Friday. But on reflection, we should have gone a bit further. For Valtteri, the car was less easy to drive than last week but not by much. We created a bit more degradation on the long runs, so we need to understand where that's coming from. But it shouldn't be too hard to solve. Lewis had a more difficult day, particularly in the second session. The car wasn't able to get close to the pace he had last Friday on both the single-lap and long runs. So, we've got some work to do tonight, to try and understand where the performance has gone. But we've already found a few clues that we'll dig into over the course of the evening. The weather doesn't look great tomorrow and we've hardly run this car in the wet, so it could be an interesting day if conditions allow Qualifying to go ahead.

Racing Point

The pink Racing Point Mercedes copy-cars are super quick

Sergio Perez
“It’s been a promising day. We’ve been chipping away and learning about our car, and that’s been positive so far – exploring where we can make improvements and find performance. It’s very close among the top teams, but we’ve shown that both cars are in the mix for points, just like we were last weekend. Obviously, there’s signs of wet weather tomorrow so let’s wait and see what happens in Qualifying."

Lance Stroll
“It’s been a good day and I’m happy with the car: the signs are that we look quite competitive. It’s unique circumstances to be racing at the same circuit two weeks in a row. We are getting to know the place extremely well. It’s still early in the season, so we were able to use today’s running to look at ways to improve the car and try some new set-up ideas to progress from last weekend. We now need to wait and see what happens with the weather and Qualifying, but we’ve put ourselves in a good position."

Ferrari

Charles Leclerc #16
“We had a difficult day, even though towards the end, we made some progress on high fuel load runs. Let’s see whether tomorrow or on Sunday, depending on the weather, we can also make progress in low fuel conditions. There’s potential in the updates we’ve brought here. We need to keep working on them to tune them and define all they can deliver. I am happy about the prospect of rain, so let’s see what tomorrow brings. Hopefully, if it rains, it won’t be too hard, so we’ll still be able to take on the track and see where we can be on the starting grid."

Sebastian Vettel #5
“Today the car felt a lot better than last week. Right from the start, it was a different car and I was just able to get on with it. Now I hope it stays like this. If you look at the time sheet, I got my best lap deleted so obviously it wasn’t a great day for lap times, but there will be rain tomorrow, so we are just preparing in case quali is on Sunday. For us, the main thing was testing the upgrades that we brought. We put them on the car step by step and they seemed to work well. We still need to have a look and find the best window where the car is happiest. We tried quite a few things on the brakes and I still need to find the rhythm. Apart from that, we did our usual Friday homework. Let’s see how wet it’s going to be tomorrow, it might mix things up."

AlfaTauri

Pierre Gasly (AT01-04, Car 10)
“It was a positive Free Practice day for us! FP1 was quite a busy session, but I think we ran all the necessary tests we wanted to do. We tried a different set-up compared to last week, which helped us understand our car a bit better and I feel like we made a step forward. So, all in all it was a good start to the weekend. Let’s see what happens tomorrow with the weather. If Qualifying can take place and it’s wet, it could be an exciting one!"

Daniil Kvyat (AT01-03, Car 26)
“It’s a different Friday today as we do not know whether we’ll be able to hit the track tomorrow or not, so we tried to do a large amount of work. I wasn’t entirely happy with the car and I think we still have to improve. However, this is normal on Fridays, when there’s always something to correct for the rest of the weekend. Let’s concentrate on today’s data to understand what we can do."

Alfa Romeo

Kimi Raikkonen (car number 7):
“It’s still early days in this second weekend here, but we can generally be a bit happier with how things have gone. We have understood the car, and how it behaves, a bit better, and I feel we have made a step forward. Of course, practice means nothing so we will need to wait until tomorrow afternoon to see where we stand. The hope is for a better weekend: it will be crucial to get to the checkered flag as it could be another race of attrition, but the aim is to be stronger and fight for the points."

Antonio Giovinazzi (car number 99):
“I like to be racing here for a second week in a row. We have analyzed a lot of the data from last weekend and our package seems to be working a little bit better. It’s still too early to know and we still have a long way to go, but we have made some progress. It will be interesting to see what weather conditions we get tomorrow: if it’s cooler or it rains, it would make quite a difference to the set-up. Like last week, the objective is to score points. It’s not going to be easy, but we need to believe in ourselves and give it a good try."

Robert Kubica (car number 88):
“It’s always a nice feeling to be in an F1 car after such a long time. It’s never easy to jump into any car after five months, but especially so in one as powerful as these. All in all, however, it has been an enjoyable day: the car is quite balanced after last weekend. We did some evaluation work and we tried to improve our package. The team knows where we have to improve, what we see in the data matches what we see on track, so we will need to keep working on extracting the maximum from what we have. For the rest of the weekend, weather conditions may be very different so understanding the best way to get the tires in their working window will be very important."

Williams

George Russell: This morning I was sat on the side lines for FP1 as Jack was in the car. This afternoon wasn’t quite as positive as we were hoping, and the track was absolutely roasting today. We did try a lot of things with the set-up and they weren’t as good as we had hoped. However, it was productive to understand why it wasn’t as positive and we learnt from that. I am quite pleased having this back-to-back at the same track, because it has given us the opportunity to try something quite drastic. I would like a nice and consistent rest of the weekend so I can go out there and show what I can do.

Nicholas Latifi: FP1 was not ideal as I had a gearbox issue, which ended my session after one lap. It is what it is, these things happen. We had quite a busy FP2 program planned prior to the issue in FP1 because of the unknown with what’s going to happen with the weather tomorrow. In general, I was quite pleased with FP2, we tried somethings coming off last weekend, just to try and improve my confidence with the car and it seemed to go in the right direction. My relative pace compared to where I was in qualifying and where I was to George is better now. In general, the changes we made from last weekend and this weekend have helped my confidence in the car and we are going in the right direction.

Jack Aitken: Driving the FW43 today was simply awesome. Jumping into a Formula One car on a race weekend is always going to put a smile on my face! The first run I was just settling in, but I was able to push on in the second run and started to feel more at home. This is the whole purpose of me doing this as the team’s Reserve Driver. It’s a shame Nicky couldn’t run, but we took on some of his run plan and managed to tick a lot of boxes which was great. Overall, I loved driving today, and can’t wait for the next time where I can push even more.

Pirelli Tires – Mario Isola

Today was a slightly unusual situation, with the teams practicing on a circuit that they had only raced on a few days previously. But it's interesting that the sessions had quite a different complexion to what we saw this time last week. There was an added urgency to FP2, as it's been suggested that these times might count towards the final grid positions if it's not possible to run qualifying as scheduled tomorrow, due to the expected heavy rain. This also made it particularly important for the teams to carry out their race preparations, with conditions on Sunday predicted to be dry, and to set an FP2 banker time in case it was needed in lieu of qualifying. From a tire perspective, there were no real surprises: everything performed as anticipated and with wet weather likely tomorrow, the teams are expected to have a full allocation of slick tires for the race, which opens up more possibilities for different strategies"