Promising Friday in the Styrian Foothills

• The opening day of running at the Austrian Grand Prix offered a busy and informative start, with hot conditions and a track temperature of 50 degrees.

• The team worked through the Soft C5 and Medium C4 compounds, trying to understand both compounds behaviour on track and manage tyre degradation throughout both sessions with the team keeping both sets of Hard tyres for the rest of the weekend.

• Both drivers showed encouraging pace across longer runs, with tyre management remaining a key focus in the demanding conditions.

• FP1 finished with both drivers at the top of the timing chart, Kimi in P1 and George in P2.

• With more representative programmes across the field, the second session offered a clearer view of the competitive order, as several teams also focused on medium tyre work.

• The Italian once again finished fastest in FP2 with George ending the day in P6, with both drivers running on the same compounds as the team collated data ahead of Sunday’s race.

• On the single lap work, Kimi showed great pace on the Softer C5 compound, 2 tenths faster than Norris’ McLaren.

Kimi Antonelli

It’s been a clean and productive day for us. From FP1 onwards, I’ve felt comfortable in the car, which gave us a good platform to work from as we built through the sessions.

The hot conditions will continue to make things quite challenging, particularly in terms of tyre management. Keeping the tyres in the right working window without overheating is important, so that’s an area we’ll continue to focus on.

We’ve gathered a lot of useful information, but there’s still work to do and the picture will likely evolve overnight. We’ll analyse everything in detail and focus on making the right improvements ahead of Qualifying.

George Russell

It’s been a solid day overall and a good place to start the weekend. The car felt competitive from the outset, and we’ve got a solid base to work from, but with the margins so tight, it’s clear a few teams are going to be in the fight.

From my side, there are still a few areas to improve. It’s clear there’s performance to unlock and those are the kind of steps we can focus on overnight. The long-run pace looked strong in the conditions we’ve seen today, which is encouraging. Tyre management is going to be important this weekend, and that is something we will continue to keep on top of throughout the weekend.

We’ve got a good foundation to build on and, with a few tweaks, I’m confident we can take a step forward and put ourselves in the mix for qualifying.

Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director

In recent years, we've failed to get the car in a good position on this track. After a lot of preparation for the past few months, it was interesting to see how the W17 was behaving today. Aside from a few tricky corners and a tendency to run the rear tyres hot, the altitude adds additional challenges to the power unit and cooling system. Our morning session was packed with test items. We managed to make good progress and were able to complete most of the usual race weekend work. We identified a few balance issues which we worked on into the afternoon session.

The track was slightly cooler in the afternoon, and Kimi finished the day on a positive note although both were able to do solid long runs. George didn't quite get the single lap together in the afternoon but that wasn't a concern in the morning. We've got plenty of data to work with overnight to put that back in a good place.

It looks quite close with the competition in terms of single lap and long run and it's hard to say exactly where we sit but compared to the last few seasons here, it seems to be a good improvement and we'll do our usual overnight work searching for that bit more pace.

FP1 Results

FP2 Results