Lewis Hamilton
It’s an incredibly fast circuit and I had a lot of fun out there. I’m so glad we got to run again today. The circuit did a great job to fix the issue we saw in FP1, and we had an interesting FP2. The balance of the car wasn’t too bad and on similar tyres, I don’t feel that we’re too far off compared to our competitors. It looks like everyone is suffering from graining and we were running out of tyres; I think everyone was in a similar boat. That’s likely due to a combination of a new track surface and the temperature. We are also running a low downforce set-up, so you are sliding through a lot of the slow-speed corners, and some of the high-speed corners too. The rest of the weekend is going to be interesting, and I think Qualifying is going to be hugely important. Managing degradation is going to be key on Saturday night in the race too. Overall though, I had a blast out there, I feel great and I’m ready to go again later today.
George Russell
It was good to finally get going after quite a long day! It was great to take to the track properly in FP2 and it’s a very fast circuit. It’s some of the highest speeds of the year and racing at night is spectacular. It’s going to be an interesting weekend. The session was dominated by trying to get the tyres working, and then managing graining too. I think that could hinder everyone come Saturday night.
The track was evolving very quickly; the early laps were like driving on ice. However, as the dirt and the dust cleared you were learning, and your braking points were changing. That’s tricky, especially with a low downforce set-up, but I had good fun out there. Overall though, it’s all about pace. It was hard to get a true idea of where we are relative to others given we only took one new set of Soft tyres, where others took two. Ultimately, race pace will be key. I’m looking forward to getting some sleep now and coming back for FP3 later today!
Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director
It was good to get running again in FP2 and we were able to complete most of our programme. Ahead of the event, we'd identified warm-up and graining as being the most significant challenges that we would face. We ran through a few tests to today aimed at further understanding those issues. The track grip was evolving rapidly, which was helping the car balance come together through the session. We know we’ve got a few areas that we can look to improve in terms of that balance and long run pace too.
It's clearly a very tight field as is becoming the norm this year. Every little bit of performance we can find ahead of Qualifying is going to be useful. It's also good to have a bit of time now to pick through the data ahead of FP3 this evening. Overall, we've got off to a decent start and we'll hopefully be able to build on that as we go into Qualifying and the Grand Prix.
