Dave Robson, Head of Vehicle Performance: As we had hoped, the track conditions are much better than last year, and this has allowed us to concentrate on car set-up. We got off to a good start in FP1 with both drivers happy with their cars. Tyre management at high fuel is a little tricky, especially in turn eight and we have a bit of work to do tonight to understand how best to deal with this on Sunday.
This afternoon we weren’t quite as quick as we had hoped on low fuel, but we are confident that we can improve this overnight. Our high fuel pace remained reasonable and we made some progress with the tyre management. The weather forecast remains uncertain for tomorrow and this will impact our plans. However, we are confident that we can do a decent job whatever the weather does, with both drivers showing excellent pace recently in wet and mixed conditions.
George Russell: Our high fuel pace looked pretty strong today, but our low fuel pace wasn’t quite as good. We need to go into more detail with the data tonight so we can find something for tomorrow but with rain forecast for overnight and in the morning, it may mean the track conditions will reset quite a lot ahead of qualifying. We have to take these opportunities where conditions are changing to our advantage and we’ve done that really well in the last few races. It will be a very tricky race on Sunday as no car has done more than 12 laps in a row on a single set of tyres and we’ve got to do quite a lot more than that during the Grand Prix.
Nicholas Latifi: The surface is not as I expected it to be, particularly from what I saw during the track walk at least, but in a positive way. Obviously, the grip is much higher than last year, and it actually feels much higher than most other tracks in general. Now that the grip is there, it’s a really fun circuit to drive and is very fast and flowing. It’s quite an enjoyable feeling and it’s exceeded my expectations. I’m still struggling to get the tyres in the right window, especially on the low fuel, so I think there’s more work to come there but in general the car doesn’t feel in a bad window. There’s definitely some fine tuning to do but I think we can make a good start tomorrow.
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