Yuki Tsunoda #22
First Practice Session – Best lap: 1:47.708, pos. 15, 21 laps
Second Practice Session – Best lap: 1:44.645, pos. 11, 24 laps

“It started pretty tricky, but we made good progress between FP1 and FP2, just not quite enough to be in the top of the midfield. It’s difficult on this kind of track to have nice balance everywhere, but we managed to improve session by session, we just need to work on some fine tuning and fix the bouncing I experienced in FP2. We have a couple of ideas already on how we can improve before FP3 tomorrow, to turn it around for a good qualifying.”

Daniel Ricciardo #3
First Practice Session – Best lap: 1:46.687, pos. 10, 23 laps
Second Practice Session – Best lap: 1:45.056, pos. 16, 26 laps

“Today was mixed. FP1 went well, it was nice to get back on this circuit, it’s been a couple of years since I last drove here. I felt like I got into the flow of it relatively well and felt good. We made some changes for FP2 to see if we could improve grip, as it’s very slippery here. However, we didn’t feel the conclusion of this enhanced things. We know what worked this morning and was in a good position, so if we use our FP1 set up and try to get a little bit more out of it, we’ll be fighting towards the front of the mid-field with a good lap in qualifying tomorrow. Like any street circuit, if you can put the lap together you can go very well. We’ll try our best to make it work.”

Alan Permane (Racing Director)

“A decent day for us although still plenty of pace to find, as the car balance was not quite perfect. It meant that neither driver was fully happy. We carried out our floor comparison with Daniel running the latest spec in FP1 and both cars running it in FP2 and we will continue analysing the data this evening. The initial impression is that it’s a decent step in the right direction. As usual at this street circuit, the track evolves throughout the day and that involves adjusting the balance to follow the improvement. Tonight, we will look carefully at our level of downforce and we might adjust that for FP3 and possibly into qualifying.”