Lewis Hamilton
It’s been a good day so far – pretty straightforward with no real issues. There are not many corners here in Austria; it’s a very fast track and it’s very close between all the tyres. The harder tyre seems to be the better for me. It’s really great to see the updates; the guys at the factory have been working so hard to bring quality components. The car feels better in certain areas around the track which is already a step forward from last week. The car felt immediately better coming out of the garage in FP1 and also at the start at FP2. It got a little worse during the afternoon session and we will try to figure out why in the debrief. But the car does feel good overall, so I’m sure we can rectify it. I’m going to keep pushing, trying to maximise a bit more out of it.
Valtteri Bottas
It’s been a good start to the weekend; we tried our new updates today and the initial feeling is that they work well. The team has done a really good job delivering the updates; every single person in the team has worked really hard on them. It worked exactly as expected which is down to all the hard work behind the scenes. Especially the rear end of the car was really stable today. Last year I had severe blistering on the rear left tyre which could potentially be an issue again as it is going to be warmer again this Sunday. So it’s good that the rear felt stable today; however, we do still have a bit of balance work to do to get the most out of the car. Qualifying is really exciting around this track. There are not a lot of corners, so you need to nail every single one of them in order to make it to the front row.
Andrew Shovlin
We have come here with a fairly comprehensive aero kit and happily that all seems to be working as expected. Both drivers were quite happy with the car from the early runs of FP1 and we haven’t had to make big changes to get it in the window. FP2 was more tricky, the balance wasn’t quite as good and it didn’t feel like we got the most out of the UltraSoft tyre on a single lap, Lewis even set his fastest lap on the Soft. Valtteri was happy with his car on the long run and his pace is encouraging. Lewis wasn’t comfortable on the UltraSoft on the long run, but the Soft tyre looked strong. We normally see Ferrari take a big step forward from Friday to Saturday so we are not paying a lot of attention to the lap times from today, rather we will try and work on the issues that both drivers have highlighted and see if we can find a bit of pace for tomorrow. It’s always a close grid at this track so getting every little detail right will be important.
