Yuki Tsunoda #22
First Practice Session – Best lap: 1:15.916, pos. 20th, 21 laps
Second Practice Session – Best lap: 1:14.211, pos. 15th, 31 laps

“Today was trickier than usual. The pace isn’t where we would’ve liked it to be, so we’ll look into what we’re missing and hopefully, it’ll be better tomorrow. The upgrade is working the way we were expecting but we are not where we want to be and off the pace we usually have, so we’ll review all the data to find what we were missing today.”

Daniel Ricciardo #3
First Practice Session – Best lap: 1:15.580, pos. 15th, 30 laps
Second Practice Session – Best lap: 1:14.257, pos. 16th, 29 laps

“We struggled a little bit today and missed a bit of competitiveness, but driving is always fun and before today I hadn’t done this track with this last sector. It was the old one a long time ago, now the new one again, and I have to say that I much prefer it because I think that it definitely brings the track to life a bit more. The main upgrade we brought here is the floor, and with these cars, it’s such a big part of development. There’s still some optimism and once we dive into it tonight, we’ll find how it’s working and better ways to set up the car around it. We still have a bit to do but I hope we can improve for tomorrow.”

Alan Permane (Racing Director)

“It wasn’t the most straightforward day for us today. We had a slightly scrappy FP1 in which we had a problem with one of the cooling systems on Yuki’s car which cost him track time to fix. We had an issue with the DRS on our new rear wing and that caused us to run with that closed for the rest of FP1 to be cautious. Of course, that costs a lot of lap time, and you never get the full feeling of the car balance if you don’t run it in the correct conditions. For FP2 we made some changes and reverted to an earlier spec of wing while the factory is carrying out a full analysis of the new one. We adjusted the setup of both cars to try and calm the rear end down a little bit, but it’s fair to say that even in FP2, neither driver was fully happy with the car. We’re lacking a little bit of rear end grip and we have work to do overnight to improve the setup and move back up the timesheets to what we feel we can achieve tomorrow. We’re happy with the numbers coming from the upgrade, all is working well and no issues there. The focus will be on the mechanical side of the car and improving the suspension setup.”