Formula 1 News

2010 Turkish GP, practice: Team quotes 

Ross Brawn: “Today’s two practice sessions were particularly busy for the team as we had our first opportunity to evaluate our new developments on the track. Without track testing it is always a challenge to bring new parts directly onto the car but we were able to achieve some good work today. Both drivers are reasonably happy but as always, we will not be able to make a valid judgement on our progress until the end of the weekend.”

Norbert Haug: “Quite a busy start into the weekend for us. The team evaluated different aero options and in the end our long run pace in race conditions looked quite promising.”

Alan Permane: “The track here is not used very often so it was quite dusty to begin with, but it had a steady evolution throughout the day. We’ve brought a new front wing here and we ran it this morning with Robert. His feedback was positive, as was the data, so we will continue running it for the rest of the weekend. Vitaly will have the new wing from tomorrow onwards. It’s been a fairly normal Friday for us with no dramas to report. We’ve run both high and low fuel with both tyres compounds and have done some good homework ahead of the race. Robert had a very good balance with the prime tyre, and not such a good balance on the option tyre, which is something we will look into this evening. Vitaly was suffering with a little bit of understeer which we’re confident of curing over night.”

Nick Wirth: “Our programme was a bit unusual today in terms of running higher fuel loads compared to how we normally approach a race weekend for a few specific reasons. When combined with a dirty and changing track, this made interpreting driver feedback and data a bit tricky, but we seemed to make progress this afternoon and I think we’ll make some more tonight. I think things will get a bit more representative tomorrow when we make the adjustments and get dialed in on low fuel.”

Stefano Domenicali: “As is always the case on the first day of a race weekend, it is difficult to draw any conclusions as to the hierarchy among the teams. We worked on race preparation and on finding performance and we are reasonably happy with what we have seen. One has to be very careful when assessing the level of competitiveness, given we are up against very strong opposition: all the same, it did not strike me we were seeing anything very different to the previous six races of this championship.”

Chris Dyer: “A reasonably positive day overall. We had a very busy work programme and we got through it without any particular problems, with the sole exception relative to Felipe’s performance on the softer tyre, because of his spin at Turn 8 on his first timed lap. The F10 seems to be okay, even if there are some details that we still need to fine tune and we believe we can do well in tomorrow’s qualifying and in Sunday’s race.”

Sam Michael: “We evaluated a couple of aero parts in the morning, which we continued with in the afternoon. With Rubens’ car, we spent some time working on car set-up, and we still have quite a lot of work to do before tomorrow. Nico made good progress today, but he lost the majority of the second session due to a hydraulic leak. The problem is fully understood and resolved.”

Dominic Harlow: “Interesting sessions today as we worked on understanding the switchable rear wing on its track debut. We have collected a great deal of data and now have to determine the best approach for the remainder of the weekend. The circuit is a little green and grip quite low overall and unfortunately we lost some track time after Adrian went off track at T8 this morning. The team worked hard and did a good job to get the car back out for FP2. Otherwise the developments we have brought to this event seem positive and we expect a close qualifying session tomorrow.”

Martin Whitmarsh: “We’ve made a number of small improvements to the car for this race, and we spent the day evaluating and back-to-backing those components on Jenson and Lewis’s cars. The job for the engineers now is to evaluate that data ahead of tomorrow’s sessions. We’re reasonably confident with the pace we showed today. While it’s not indicative of overall performance, we feel that our package should be quite efficient here, and, as always, we’re confident that we’ll be able to refine the car overnight ahead of qualifying tomorrow. This is a demanding circuit – for both drivers and engineers, and we’ve still got plenty of work to do to optimise our cars for qualifying and the race.”

Jody Egginton: “We had a good balance from the start of the day on Heikki’s car, which meant we could complete the entire program. We gathered a lot of data, particularly on the long run, and managed to get good performance from the new tyres, so I’m very happy. On a personal level I enjoyed my day today – it was all quite short notice, but it was good to dust off the old clipboard and get on with it, so overall it’s been a good day!”

Mike Gascoyne: “A fairly positive day, although it was a shame Jarno’s day was curtailed by a gearbox problem in P2. That meant he couldn’t run the soft tyres, or try a low fuel run, but I’m sure that if he’d done so he would have been up with Heikki. Heikki had another trouble free day, and overall we’ve taken another step forward to the midfield, so now it’s up to us to confirm that progress tomorrow.”

James Key: “It was a fairly standard Friday where we ran through the programmes on both cars looking at setting up the car for the circuit and the tyres. There are significant balance changes with different fuel levels and tyre compounds we need to consider for the qualifying and the race. Otherwise no technical problems, the drivers are fairly happy with the conditions they found the cars in. I think the race pace looks reasonable, we got some work to do for lower fuel levels but we have some clear directions to pursue for that. It’s obviously very close in the midfield, so we have to make sure we get the best out of the cars.”

Laurent Mekies: “Today’s programme involved evaluating new components on both cars, which meant that unlike a usual Friday, we did not focus so much on pure race preparation, regarding it more like a test session. Now we have to look at our data and take the best of the elements we tried on the two cars and then make the right decision in terms of how to progress tomorrow. Of course, we also went through the normal procedures of doing a tyre comparison, different fuel scans and other basic race weekend work.”