Fahrerstimmen – Tag 1

It has been a positive day. The updates seem to work well and the car felt good, especially on the flying laps. The long runs were a bit more challenging due to the graining. For sure, today’s high temperatures were an important factor to consider, but we need to look carefully into how we can protect the tyres as much as possible.
Given I’ll take a penalty on Sunday, we now need to focus on preparing the car for the race. There is room for improvement, so we’ll keep digging!

The sessions went quite well today. Our qualifying pace was pretty good, so our focus now will be on our race pace.
Tyre management will be key, as the temperatures are so high this weekend. I am confident that we will be all set by the time Sunday comes as we know where we need to improve.

I think FP2 was a little bit more difficult for us than FP1 as we didn’t get the balance that we had hoped for. We were also trying different things with the car. We’ll have a look at it all overnight and of course try to be quicker tomorrow. I think the long run is better but the tyres are running really hot so it’s difficult to judge where you really are. Overall, this track is tough on tyres, I think we all needed a few more laps to have a more accurate look at the long runs.

Es war sehr angenehm, wieder auf dieser Strecke zu fahren, denn sie macht in gewisser Hinsicht richtig Spaß. Einige Teams hatten mit den hohen Temperaturen mehr zu kämpfen als andere. Wir sind nur fünf Runden in Folge gefahren, aber wir sind wahrscheinlich auch etwas weiter von der Pace entfernt, als wir uns erhofft hatten. Wir haben heute Abend noch einiges zu tun, sowohl hier an der Strecke als auch in den Fabriken. Es gibt viel zu besprechen, und wir müssen sicherstellen, dass wir unsere Pace für morgen optimieren können. Nach dem heutigen Tag sieht es so aus, als ob wir Zeit finden, aber alle anderen Teams bringen auch immer wieder Updates, und so erzielt das gesamte Feld Fortschritte. Obwohl wir also Zeit gutmachen, gilt das für unsere Konkurrenten ebenso. Jetzt müssen wir uns die Daten ansehen, um zu erfahren, ob unsere Upgrades funktionieren, denn manchmal ist es nicht so einfach, wie es auf den Rundengrafiken aussieht.

Nyck hat heute Morgen einen starken Job gemacht. Er war großartig und ich bin dankbar für die Arbeit, die er geleistet hat. Wir haben zwischen den Trainings einige Veränderungen vorgenommen, was verrückt ist, wenn man bedenkt, dass ich das Auto noch nicht einmal gefahren bin. Wir haben noch eine Menge Arbeit vor uns. Wir sind hier nicht spektakulär, und ich weiß nicht warum, also können wir hoffentlich über Nacht einen kleinen Schritt nach vorne machen, denn wir liegen weiter zurück, als wir vor diesem Wochenende erwartet haben. Wir müssen uns die Daten genau ansehen, aber es sieht so aus, als ob uns heute der Abtrieb gefehlt hat. Es war nicht die beste Session für mich, vor allem natürlich weil ich die erste verpasst habe. Ich habe versucht, in Schwung zu kommen, aber es war sehr heiß hier, und es gab viele langsame Runden, alles in allem denke ich, dass ich mich gut geschlagen habe.

A reasonable day. It’s been a day of trying the new parts on the car and trying to understand them and figure them out for tomorrow. I think we’ve done that. The pace of the car and the handling’s in a reasonable position – but also a bit different between the old package and the new package. There’s still some adapting to do with my driving and so on, so a bit more potential to move forward tomorrow. We’ll have a look this evening, figure it out and see what we can improve on for Saturday.

Clearly, in terms of performance, we were back in the Top 10 with 5th this morning and 7th this afternoon. The feeling in the way the car behaved showed a lot of positive signs with the new parts we brought this weekend. It is great to have this package for my home race and to see all the people around the track. Now we need to work to understand what we tested today and go through all the data to be able to put it together for Quali tomorrow. The way the front reacts is sharper and more reactive, especially in these longer corners where we used to wash out and overheat the tyres badly. The tyres are still overheating, which we will have to work on for the race, but it should be a fun one.

I don’t think it was a bad day. We made a decent jump from FP1 to FP2 – it didn’t look so good in FP1 – but then we made some changes and found some pace. Hopefully that carries into tomorrow and we have a good FP3, going into qualifying. It’s very impressive how the team is finding pace in the car despite no upgrades so I’m very happy about that and I’m excited to see what the car will be like when we do get upgrades.

We were trying quite a bit today with some updates to the car and I’d say we are still trying to figure out the best way to set the car up with it, so still learning. I think looking at the positions, both cars in the top 10 is obviously not too bad – but I do think there’s still quite a lot to come from that. I think we’ve still certainly got some more in it. We’ll just try to fine-tune it and understand a bit more tonight. I think we feel ok about today but there’s quite a bit more to get out of it so we will get out there tomorrow and have a bit more fun.

Ich bin sehr dankbar für diese Gelegenheit, es war eine tolle Erfahrung. Natürlich war es sehr cool, wieder in einem so schnellen Auto zu sitzen, und es war eine kleine Umstellung zu dem, was ich gewohnt bin. Alles in allem war es eine großartige Session und eine fantastische Gelegenheit. Wir sind alle Testelemente durchgegangen und haben es geschafft, eine Menge Arbeit für das Team zu erledigen. Es war eine gute Session, ich war schnell auf der Strecke und fühlte mich wohl im Auto. Das Team hat mich sehr gut unterstützt, und wir bekamen die Informationen, die wir brauchten. Lewis war fantastisch und hat mich auch sehr unterstützt. Außerdem hatte ich Angela an meiner Seite, was wirklich nett war. Insgesamt war es also ein sehr produktives Training.

We had a delay in this session due to a bit of an issue with one of the roll bars but it was nothing major. I am not overly comfortable with the car at the moment, I think there is some good work and understanding to be done overnight. We also only had a short stint on the soft tyre but hopefully tomorrow we are able to pull it all together and be in the fight for qualifying and the race on Sunday.

It was a challenging Friday for us especially driving in these extremely hot conditions in France. We tried to adapt the car as best as we could to deal with these high temperatures and focused on tyre management and cooling down during the two practice sessions. On reflection, we are not totally happy with the balance of the car so far and we need to look at some potential changes overnight. I’m confident we can improve things and be in good shape for Qualifying tomorrow in front of our home crowd.

Stepping into the car at the beginning of FP2, it took me a few laps to get into the rhythm but I had a good feeling with the car straight away. The midfield seems even closer than usual, and I have a feeling there’s a lot more to come, both from the car and myself. I am looking forward to qualifying: I think we have a good chance of doing well.

I went a little faster than I did yesterday in the 100-year-old car! We ran with two different specs on the cars today. It was good to compare but now we have to pick and choose what works best for FP3 and qualifying tomorrow. The key for us will be to try and make it into Q2 tomorrow so we have a good starting point for the race. The midfield is really tight so I hope we can be a bit more in the mix. Our race pace always seems to be slightly better, so hopefully we can find more of an edge for Sunday. Whatever happens, it is going to be hot.

We had a good comparison to Pierre this morning, which gives us enough data for tomorrow. There was a clear difference with the new package this afternoon straight away from the first push lap, so I’m happy about that. It will be challenging, but based on the performance we had today, we can be positive. There are things we still need to adjust, but hopefully we can finetune them in FP3 to be able to make it into Q3 in Qualifying. I didn’t feel crazy degradation, so that’s positive, but the race will be hotter so we will have to see.

It was a good day today. The car felt okay – particularly on the long runs we did in FP2 – but it was definitely hot out there for everyone this afternoon. We will look at the data tonight and what we can work on for tomorrow. It is a tight midfield so it is tough to predict where exactly we will be in qualifying.

It was a good day for us as the car was feeling really good around this circuit, so I’m feeling positive. Hopefully we can use this and do a bit more and come out even stronger for tomorrow. All in all, I’m really happy with today.

It has been quite a smooth day for me; we went through the whole programme we had set out to achieve without issues. It was very hot out there, very tricky in terms of managing the tyres, but it’s the same for everyone and the key will be to find the best way to set the car up. FP1 has been very good and I was very comfortable, while in FP2, where we tried something different on the two cars, I personally struggled a little bit: however, I reckon the direction we need to take for tomorrow is clear, so I am looking forward to qualifying. Looking at our performances today, I think we look stronger than in Austria, so it’s a good step up, but then again it is once again super tight in the midfield battle, and tyres will make the difference: it will be all about getting laps together in qualifying and trying to avoid getting into traffic. Tomorrow will be a challenge and Sunday will be too, given the heat and the temperature, but I can’t wait to put myself in the game.

First of all, it’s great to be driving in France again in front of the home crowd. There’s nothing that beats racing at home and it’s just a great feeling to drive around Circuit Paul Ricard as a French driver and already seeing so many fans on a Friday. In terms of the sessions today, we tried different things on both cars, and it was all about gathering a vast amount of data. We tried Soft and Medium compound tyres plus high and low fuel and we have a good read on information to make the right adjustments on the car for tomorrow. There’s definitely more to come.

Sometimes you want to try and go to the limit and that’s what I did and carrying a lot of speed into that corner is helpful in terms of lap time and in that sense maybe it was a bit too much. It’s a bit unfortunate as that meant we were on the short side for tires on the long run but on the other hand you’ve got to try. The car felt good this morning, a bit worse this afternoon, so we’ll be analyzing why and trying to figure out how we can make it better but I don’t see a reason why we can’t get it back into the window tomorrow.

It’s been a busy session on my side of the garage: we had quite a lot of boxes to tick in these 60 minutes, from rake runs for data at the beginning of the session to a tight schedule of runs later in the hour. It was definitely warm out there and not the easiest conditions: still, it is always nice to drive a Formula One car and help the team with learning the set-up for the track. The feeling with the car was quite different from my previous outings, perhaps because of the heat: it will be interesting to go through the data with the engineers and understand better what we encountered, to make the car better for tomorrow and the rest of the weekend.

I don’t feel there was anything upgrade related which is a good sign, so we’ll just have to see. It’s a positive that we have some good cross-car data and are now running both cars on the new aero package, which means double data for the team. Let’s see what we can do overnight and tomorrow.