George Russell
It definitely hasn’t been our smoothest Friday this season, a bit of a strange one because we think it’s going to be wet for qualifying tomorrow and then different again on Sunday. We tried quite a few things with the car and used today as a test session so while it’s been a tough day, it’s probably been a productive one. Today was about gathering lessons long-term rather than maximising our lap times, but we were further behind than we probably expected with a couple of issues here and there. Tomorrow is going to be a totally new day and Sunday, we’ll be in a different place too.
Lewis Hamilton
The car was a struggle today, it’s crazy how it swings from track to track and tonight we’ll be working on setup to try and get the car working. At the moment, it’s a little loose and not doing what we want it to do. Not much has changed since last week, I’m still the same driver! But for some reason at this track, the car isn’t working as well. In the glimpses where it was working, we were still down a second which was actually similar to last week. I didn’t get much chance of a long run at the end because I sustained some damage to my floor and lost a lot of downforce. It’s going to be a tough weekend, but we’ll give it everything.
Andrew Shovlin
The morning session was reasonable but we’d made some changes going into the afternoon on both cars that look to have taken us in the wrong direction. That’s easy enough to undo for tomorrow, and it looks like we are going to get some rain so hopefully we can recover the situation but other than finding out what not to do, the afternoon wasn’t a lot of use. To further add to matters, Lewis picked up some damage on his low fuel run which we couldn’t repair in time so by the end of the session, the car was very difficult and very inconsistent. The weather for the rest of the weekend looks like a wet day tomorrow followed by a dry race but in cooler conditions than we had today. Whilst we’re disappointed with the pace in the afternoon, we’ve hopefully picked up some useful learning over the day. We’ve got a busy night ahead in the garage and the engineering office to make sure we can gather up the situation for tomorrow. Qualifying is more important here than at most tracks so that’s our focus; we know the car works well when it’s in the right window so that’s what we’ll be trying to achieve.
