Intriguing First Day in Malaysia

• F1 returned to the PETRONAS Sepang International Circuit for the first time in nine years as the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia weekend got underway.

• Warm and humid conditions greeted the field ensuring that the tyres would be given a thorough test when combined with the circuit’s aggressive tarmac and its medium to high-speed corners.

• Both drivers ran the Medium and Soft compounds in both practice sessions, with George finishing the first hour in P2 with Kimi P5.

• In between the sessions, the team focused on improving its management of the tyres on the long run.

• With rain showers on the radar, the team pulled forward its programme for FP2 with both drivers failing to maximise their solitary Soft tyre laps, ending the day in a slightly unrepresentative P7 and P8 on the timing screens.

• By running ahead of programme, the team gathered plenty of long run data with George on the Soft and Kimi splitting between that tyre and the Medium compound.

George Russell

It was a really cool experience to get out on track for the first time here at the PETRONAS Sepang International Circuit. I’ve never driven here before and it’s great to do so given how iconic this place is. The support we’ve had here as a team is also amazing so thanks for all the fans for coming out today and over the weekend.

With these warm conditions, combined with the aggressive tarmac and the characteristics of the circuit, the tyre degradation throughout practice was high. That was as we expected coming into the weekend but with the amount of overheating on the tyres, it slightly neutralises the performance of any extra downforce we’ve added with our update. The cars are operating in quite a different window to what we usually do, and I don’t think we quite got ours into the place that we needed today. We will look to get on top of that overnight and hopefully, if we do so, we can be in the fight at the front for the rest of the weekend.

Kimi Antonelli

We have had a decent first day on track here in Malaysia. The PETRONAS Sepang International Circuit is incredible to drive! It is fast and flowing so it’s super cool. We were able to complete lots of running across both sessions and worked through a full programme too. We gathered plenty of data, both useful for understanding the new update we’ve brought here and for helping us make improvements over the rest of the weekend here in Malaysia.

We’ve still got a lot of work to do though. The Red Bulls look the fastest on both the single lap and the long run, with McLaren and Ferrari also competitive on higher fuel in particular. The track was quite low grip today and it is likely that it will improve into Saturday and Sunday. We will work hard tonight to find improvements overnight and do our best come qualifying tomorrow afternoon.

Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director

We were running the latest update package on both cars today but rather than seeing the step in lap time that we had hoped for, we have been chasing a tricky balance and a fair amount of tyre overheating. We had a few test items on the cars in FP1 that might have clouded the situation but for FP2, we had both cars in a representative configuration, and it looked like we were still trailing, especially to the Red Bull.

We've got some good ideas for setup changes to investigate during the overnight simulator work and will continue to analyse today's data to understand why we seem to lack a bit of a pace. we're optimistic that with such a new package, these analyses will bear some fruit. The headline times are not especially representative, and we should be able to make some relatively easy progress on the single lap pace. Our concern is more the long run where we seemed unusually offset on pace and that is going to be the more challenging problem to solve.

FP1 Results

FP2 Results