Dave Robson, Head of Vehicle Performance: It has been a slightly odd day with the wet weather persisting all day, the Pirelli dry tyre testing consequently cancelled, but FP2 remaining at 90mins duration. With a risk of rain for Sunday, there was little appetite for running multiple sets of wet and intermediate tyres. Although this limited the amount of running that we could sensibly complete, we were still able to do some useful testing and start to get Alex and Nicholas into the rhythm of Suzuka.
The weather forecast for tomorrow is for dry conditions and so we will have to start again in FP3 and understand how the Pirelli slick tyres work here. We should be able to apply some of the learning from today to the dry and therefore start the session in a good place.
Nicholas Latifi: It’s my first experience here and it’s a very fun track to drive. It’s much easier to learn a track when it’s dry as you can focus on hitting your references and not have to worry about sliding around out there. Even in the wet there’s still a lot of grip, so I can only imagine what it’s going to be like in the dry and hopefully we can experience that tomorrow. It’s yet to be seen how much of today will be useful for the coming days as there’s still a chance of rain on Sunday but unlikely for Saturday. Overall, I’m happy with today with no real issues and now our focus is on maximising the dry running for tomorrow.
Alex Albon: Even in the rain this track is amazing; I love it round here! Today wasn’t too bad and I enjoyed it. It’s hard to get a real feel for the car in the wet, but we were not too bad in terms of competitiveness, so we need to see what happens tomorrow when it’s dry. The target is a little unknown, but the simple goal is that we are aiming for Q2.
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