George Russell
I felt good in the car today. Barcelona is a great track to race at, so it was a nice feeling being out there and getting a good number of laps on the board. Our qualifying runs looked decent in the second practice session, and it was nice to be closer to where we hope to be performance wise.
We did a lot of long run work today too and compared to other teams, we weren’t quite as competitive as on the single lap. We experimented with some different approaches across our cars though and that gives us plenty of good data to dig through tonight. We will also do the usual overnight work and I’m confident that we can take a step forward tomorrow. Let’s see what the next two days bring.
Kimi Antonelli
That was an interesting Friday. My first few laps on low fuel were proving tricky in FP1. I suffered from some bouncing in that first hour, mostly in the high-speed segments of the track. However, everything started to come together in FP2. I felt more confident lap after lap, and I was able to get into a good rhythm on the single runs.
We purposefully adopted a slightly different approach on our long runs to George. We now will take the time to look at all the data we collected throughout the day and evaluate what the right direction is for the rest of the weekend. I can see we are making progress though, and with the overnight work tonight, I’m hopeful we will be able to have a competitive weekend.
Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director
That was a solid day where we were able to complete our programme without any hitches. It's nice to have had two Friday sessions without any red flags or other interruptions. We had purposefully put together a busy plan and thankfully were able to get through all of it.
Our focus for the day was to understand some of our recent long run issues and we had the cars in quite different configurations. There was a good amount that we were able to learn from that, and we will pick through the data tonight and decide what direction to go in and what to carry into tomorrow. As expected, it's very warm here in Barcelona and that weather will remain for the rest of the weekend. Keeping the tyres alive across the stint length is going to be difficult but it should make for an interesting race.
Noah Strømsted, Mercedes Junior – FIA F3
After finishing P11 in the practice session this morning, we knew we had a lot to work on before heading into Qualifying. We made some progress but not quite as much as we would have hoped to. We were aware that the field would be tight as we had seen in practice. I managed to put together a decent lap and get P8, a few tenths behind the pole sitter. With the reversed grid race tomorrow and a P5 start, I will be looking to fight for some solid points.
