08/10/2021
NEWS STORY
Pierre Gasly: "Today I haven't felt that great in the car, but we've still come away with two strong positions which is positive, and I believe there is more we can give again tomorrow. I wasn't too happy with the balance of the car, as I was experiencing a lot of understeer, so that's something we've got to work on. I believe it's something that a lot of drivers have been experiencing, so we need to go away and analyse what we can do to improve this and hopefully we can continue to improve our performance in FP3."
Yuki Tsunoda: "I think this is a really amazing track and I've really enjoyed my first two sessions here at Istanbul Park. I've been building my confidence up gradually and this afternoon I think we've shown some good pace. The conditions today have been windy but fairly good, however tomorrow there may be rain, so this could prove trickier again. We'll have to see what happens with the weather, and prepare as much as we can for that, but we're happy with the performance of the car so far this weekend and I think we've shown a big improvement."
Jonathan Eddolls (Chief Race Engineer): "We came here with a number of unknowns surrounding how the tyres would behave, given what we all observed last year, alongside what the impact of the measures the circuit have taken to improve the grip here for this weekend would be. We planned for low-grip conditions but were pleasantly surprised when the first push lap was already faster than anything we achieved in the dry last year, so we were back to more normal conditions. This meant that the car wasn't optimised for the track condition we had in this morning's session, so we had to make a number of changes ahead of FP2. These were for sure in the right direction, but we still faced balance limitations and there is still plenty of room to improve the car for tomorrow. We also approached the weekend differently with Yuki and so far, this has worked - he has more confidence and has performed well. The weather could pose some further excitement tomorrow, particularly in FP3, but we are confident we can find some additional performance in the car overnight."
Check out our Friday gallery from Istanbul, here.