Formula One news

Renault comfortable despite positions

Renault's drivers completed busy programmes in both the morning and afternoon sessions, conducting baseline set-up work, comparing the two tyre types available and assessing the new aerodynamic package available to the team this weekend. As always, the programmes focused on race preparations on heavy fuel loads but unusually, the drivers did not get clean, flying laps on soft tyres at the end of the session, unlike many other competitors. 

"It was a normal Friday for us," said Fisichella. "As usual, we did our race preparation today, working to find a good baseline set-up for Sunday, and to look at the tyres. There is still some work to do overnight to get the balance right, and we need to improve our competitiveness a little bit too. But we have seen many times this season, that we are a little far away on Friday - and more competitive in qualifying and the race. We did our job today, and completed our programme. Now we need to follow our plans and analyse the data in order to achieve a good level of competitiveness in qualifying tomorrow."

Heikki Kovalainen commented, "The main thing for us today was to do our usual tyre comparison, which we managed and got a good answer from. The set-up programme was busy too, and while not all the changes were positive today, we have found the direction to go in for tomorrow. The car is not as stable as usual at the moment, so we need to improve that area to find more lap-time. The job now is to get our heads down, understand where we can make the car better for tomorrow's practice session, and to have a trouble-free morning to prepare for qualifying."

Engineering chief Pat Symonds added, "Just as we found last year, grip levels during first practice were extremely low, and it was very difficult to get the car working well in those conditions. Fortunately, the heavy rain at lunchtime did not affect our programmes too much, and the car was working much better in second practice. As usual, we remained on a high fuel load throughout the day, as we looked at the behaviour of the two types of tyre and evaluated our new aero package."

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