06/09/2019
NEWS STORY
Pierre Gasly: "It was a good first day in the car with quite a few laps on the board. I'm feeling more comfortable with the car now and we managed to do a few laps on the wet tyre this morning and try different things, especially for me to get a good feeling with this car in the wet which was good. We had the first proper dry session in FP2 which I would say was quite positive, finishing with the seventh best time of the session. Our long run pace was strong so it's looking good, although we know we will start from the back on Sunday, but at the moment I'm happy with the car. If we can find a bit more pace we should have an exciting race."
Daniil Kvyat: "I think we had a decent Friday and managed to get a lot of mileage covered. We were able to complete our plan and the car is behaving quite well, I think we can try to optimise the package further for tomorrow and see if we can squeeze a bit more out of it. I was generally quite satisfied with how today went, so we need to work well overnight to continue improving the car."
Jonathan Eddolls (Chief Race Engineer): "As we arrived at the track this morning, the weather forecast looked like it would rain through both sessions, so it was a pleasant surprise that we managed to get dry running. Overall, we had a very productive day, the track started between wet and intermediate conditions, though it quickly evolved into intermediates. We did a rear wing level compare to see what would be optimum for those conditions. The car seemed reasonably well balanced out of the box and it looked quite competitive, which we are happy with. The rain stopped so we managed to get some dry running at the end of the session and, again, the car seemed reasonably balanced in the cool conditions. There were no big limitations in FP1, we just needed some fine tuning going into FP2. We didn't make any major changes moving to the second session - there was some rain around and it was difficult to know when it was going to come. We went out straight away, as did many others, and completed our normal FP2 programme. The rain didn't have a big impact on the session, so we completed the two normal low fuel runs followed by the high fuel ones. The cooler conditions seem to suit our car, so our main goal is to follow the changes to the track, and to maintain the competitiveness that we've shown today."
Toyoharu Tanabe (Honda F1 Technical Director): "The occasional rain meant we did not get as much dry running as we would have liked, but it is the same for everyone. However, more rain is forecast for Sunday, so running in the wet had some value. In Belgium we introduced Spec 4 on two of our cars and here we have fitted it to the remaining two. We are planning to have all four cars race with it on Sunday and we will now work on analysing today's data to prepare as well as possible for qualifying and the race on this unique high-speed track."