Barcelona, Spain
4.655km / 2.89 miles
FP1
Weather: Warm and Dry
Air & Track Temperatures: 16-19°C / 23-34°C
V Bottas, FW38-03, PU106C Hybrid, 1:25.672 (7th)
F Massa, FW38-02, PU106C Hybrid 1:26.186 (9th)
Quickest time: S. Vettel (1:23.951)
FP2
Weather: Warm and Dry
Air & Track Temperatures: 19-21°C / 36-43°C
V Bottas, FW38-03, PU106C Hybrid, 1:25.708 (11th)
F Massa, FW38-02, PU106C Hybrid, 1:26.491 (16th)
Quickest time: N. Rosberg (1:23.922)
Objectives: Aero evaluations, set-up and tyre work.
Rob Smedley, Head of Performance Engineering: We’ve had an interesting day. We’ve mainly been concentrating on the car set-up, and trying to find different areas to work on which would suit this type of circuit. It’s a very low-efficiency type of circuit, where the benefit of low drag and high power is less favourable, so we’re trying to find a way to claw back a little bit of performance. We were a little bit more competitive in FP1 than we were in FP2, so we need to look at what changes we made between the sessions and understand if they have affected that. In the long runs we looked OK, not where we want to be yet, but it was reasonably competitive. On the lower fuel runs we’ve got some work to do overnight, especially in sector three, as the cars were not very well balanced.
Valtteri Bottas: I think today was OK. We knew it would be a bit trickier here, but I’m sure we can be better tomorrow than what we’ve seen from the laptimes today. We still have some things we can turn up for qualifying. I reckon it’s going to be very close in terms of laptimes, and in Q3. Whatever small things we can find today, with both the set-up and driving-wise, will be a big help tomorrow.
Felipe Massa: It wasn’t a very fantastic Friday. I managed to understand the tyres which is the most important thing. I made some mistakes on my laps on the new tyres, which is why I couldn’t do a better laptime. It wasn’t like the Friday we had in Russia, but we are working hard for tomorrow to be as fast as we can.
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