What the teams said - Friday in Abu Dhabi

[King_of_lion]

Toro Rosso Gasly was the unlucky recipient of a helmet covered in oil after he was right behind Ricciardo when the Aussie's engine went up in flames. He was lucky to make it back to the pits in one piece, needing his visor cleaned for good measure. When not skating on oil, the Frenchman looked quick once again and might fancy continuing the momentum garnered in Brazil. As for Kvyat, he actually pipped his team mate in both sessions and will be hunting a first Q3 appearance since Mexico. Daniil Kvyat - FP1: 1:39.969, P15; FP2: 1:37.651, P9 “It was a productive day, FP1 wasn’t so important as the conditions are different to the conditions we race in, but it’s still useful to get some reference points and see how the car behaves. FP2 was also productive, all of the laps were important because the conditions are more representative for the race, so it was good to put so many laps in during the session. We’ll see when we study the data tonight what we need to do with the car for tomorrow. I felt quite good with the car today, but it doesn’t mean we can stop working and leave everything like this, things change over the weekend and we need to adapt.” Pierre Gasly - FP1: 1:40.401, P16; FP2: 1:37.770, P10 “It was a bit of a messy FP1 between the red flags and getting blocked on my second run, so it wasn’t an ideal session as we didn’t do many laps. The good thing was we were still able to test a couple of things we had planned. FP2 was a better session, as between the two cars we completed more testing ahead of Qualifying and the race, so now we have good things to analyse to decide what’s the best configuration for tomorrow. I’m happy with this afternoon, the long-run pace was strong and I think there’s more to come in the short runs. To finish in the Top 10 today makes us feel positive.” Jonathan Eddolls, Chief Race Engineer “We didn’t have the easiest FP1 session today and this was reflected on the timing sheets. We ran the Option first followed by the Prime, which was never going to help flatter us, and we came here with a number of test items, which were unfortunately interrupted by the red flags. This means we were a little bit on the back foot during that session. Yas Marina is a track where it’s easy to get stuck in traffic, and this happened particularly to Pierre as he struggled to get a clean lap. For Dany, the car balance was quite good in FP1, while Pierre struggled a little bit more. We did a lot of analysis on the data and made a number of changes going into FP2, so we had a cleaner session this afternoon. We were able to show the true competitiveness of the car over the short runs with both cars ending the day in the Top 10, which is where they should be, so that was positive. In the long runs, the option tyre showed to be quite stable, but there is still some work to do, particularly if we make it to Q3 tomorrow as it would be the race start tyre. The performance on the other two compounds on the long runs looked pretty good, so there’s still a lot to analyse tonight, but I think we can look forward to a reasonable performance for the rest of the weekend.” Toyoharu Tanabe, Honda F1 Technical Director “From a PU point of view, everything went smoothly today across both teams. In FP2 when conditions were similar to those we will experience in qualifying and the race, all four of our cars were in the top ten, which is a solid performance. However, we still have plenty of work to do to get our settings right for the rest of the weekend, to improve our performance. We will analyse our data carefully – mainly from FP2 – to be as well prepared as possible for qualifying.”

get a good number of laps in second practice. With the team opting to focus on race pace, it is hard to know where they are in the pecking order, but the expectation is certainly higher than they finished in FP2. Nico Hulkenberg - FP1: 1:39.505, P10; FP2: 1:38.122, P15 “It was a fairly standard Friday. The first session was hot under the sun and then things cooled in the evening where conditions are similar to both qualifying and the race. There were no particular problems for us and we worked through our programme as planned. The car felt good in the first session but we seemed to lose a bit of performance in the evening. We need to see what happened there. We’ll dig into the data and aim to make some improvements ready for qualifying.” Daniel Ricciardo - FP1: 1:40.850, P19; FP2: 1:38.400, P16 “It wasn’t the smoothest Friday for us today. We missed a bit of running with the engine issue in the first session and, in the evening, we made some changes to the car. We were a bit off the pace, we haven’t quite found the balance yet, so we’ll be looking for some further tweaks ahead of qualifying. I’m feeling confident we’ll get there and find the sweet spot to put us in a pretty good place for tomorrow and for the race.” Alan Permane, Sporting Director “Today proved to be a tricky day for us. FP1 went well enough but in the cooler conditions of FP2 we didn’t quite get the tyres into their working window for the first timed laps early in the session. As always we seem competitive on high fuel and we will be looking at various settings overnight to have the car in the right configuration to make some headway in final practice and qualifying tomorrow.”