Nico Rosberg was happy to see in a jump in performance at the Circuit de Catalunya as the European season gets underway. The German was once again fastest in second practice on Friday and is now looking towards carrying the Williams team's improved form into qualifying and the race.
"Today was our first run with the new aero components on the car and they all seemed to work well," Rosberg - 'Mr. Friday' - reported. "They're giving us a few tenths extra per lap so we've made definite progress. Everyone has brought new developments here, though, so we will see how things look in qualifying. We also ran some tyre comparisons today; it's not obvious which direction will be the right one, so strategy is going to be very important and will have a major impact on the race."
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| A message from the main grandstand suggesting Nico Rosberg's future... |
"We had a normal Friday during which we carried out short runs to prepare for qualifying and long runs to prepare for the race," said technical director Sam Michael, who followed the sessions from the team's headquarters in Grove. "The tyres are much closer than we anticipated on the basis of the tests we've had here and the hard tyres look stronger than they have at other circuits. We should therefore expect to see more even strategies from the teams on Sunday, rather than these unbalanced strategies that we've seen in the first four races of the year whereby people have run very short final stints."
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