14/04/2017
NEWS STORY
Paddy Lowe, Chief Technical Officer: Well this was a big contrast weather wise from China! It's extremely hot here, with incredibly high surface temperatures on the track in FP1 especially. We first ran on the Medium and I think we were similar to all the other teams in finding that a very difficult tyre. Remarkably, it's roughly two to three seconds slower than the Soft compound tyre, which we fitted just after. So that's an interesting result which will need to be understood. On the Soft tyres both cars performed reasonably well. It was particularly great for Lance who set his first purple sector of his Formula One career in Sector 1 during the session. Unfortunately, Felipe had a brake failure at the end of FP1, which was due to an issue that we have now understood and resolved. Then we went into FP2, which is our main practice for qualifying and the race due to the evening conditions. Both drivers ran on the Soft and Supersoft tyres on low and high fuel. Felipe's performance in particular was very strong, on every run. In contrast Lance struggled throughout the session, which wasn't the case in FP1. So we need to understand that ahead of tomorrow. Overall, I think it was a good day and we will do our work tonight and see what we can achieve in qualifying tomorrow.
Felipe Massa: It was a positive day. I'm happy with the performance of the car on the new tyres and especially the old tyres as it's quite consistent with race simulation. We've shown quite reasonable performance today. We need to concentrate on everything we've done this evening and prepare the car even better for tomorrow evening, as well as Sunday. I'm really looking forward to a good weekend.
Lance Stroll: In FP1 I got into the car and immediately felt very comfortable and confident. In FP2 I was struggling with the car and we have to see if anything was wrong with it, but no worries as this was only practice. Then at the end of the session there was some burning in my feet. We will have to investigate to see what it was as I had to get out of the car. The positives are getting into the car in FP1 and feeling good, but we need to see what happened in FP2 as it seemed a bit of a bizarre session.
Check out our Friday gallery from Bahrain, here.