Solid Opening Day in Monza

• The final European double-header of the season kicked off with Friday’s track action in Monza.

• It was a fruitful day for the team with plenty of single lap and long run work completed.

• George ended the day fastest on the single lap with team-mate Kimi in P3.

• Kimi, who will start from the back of the grid due to power unit penalties, focused mainly on long run work with George running a more balanced programme.

• Both drivers ran the Medium compound in FP1 and the Hard in FP2, pairing them with the Soft tyre on both occasions.

• Whilst they didn’t end the day top of the timing screens, the upgraded Ferrari looked very competitive on both the single lap and long run.

George Russell

It was great to be back on track here in Monza. It’s a brilliant circuit and always fun to drive. It was quite a strong Friday for us; we got through lots of work and seemed to have decent pace on both the single lap and long run. We made some adjustments after FP1 that helped but we know we’ve still got more work to do overnight.

Ferrari looked very competitive and they still look to be the ones to beat. We also know how strong McLaren have been recently and I have no doubt they will get themselves in the mix for tomorrow. We can’t count out Red Bull either. It’s an encouraging opening to the weekend but it’s early days. Let’s see what Saturday brings.

Kimi Antonelli

It’s amazing to be here at Monza! There has been so much support from the fans, and it means so much to me. I can’t wait to see it over the rest of the weekend, and I just want to say thank you so much to everyone who is cheering for me and the team.

Today was a little bit different to a usual Friday. As we will be starting from the back of the grid, we focused much more of our efforts on optimising for our race pace. We gathered a lot of data, and we didn’t seem too far away in terms of competitiveness. We will need to be strong if we are to battle our way back towards the front of the field; we will need to do a lot of overtaking on Sunday. We got some experience of that by running in traffic during our long runs and that will hopefully prove to be very useful learning for the race.

Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director

Overall we’ve had a good Friday here in Monza. It's hard to know where you will end up in terms of performance going from a high downforce track like Zandvoort to a low downforce track like Monza, but the read today was fairly encouraging. There's no guarantee that Friday pace translates into Saturday and Sunday, but the car is in a decent place, and we can look to find some further improvements from there.

The programmes were quite different across the two cars. George was running a standard programme and Kimi with his power unit penalty was more focused on race preparation. The track grip has been surprisingly good from the start and that prompted us to drop the wing level with George going into FP2. That also gave us a good cross-car compare.

There is a bit of data to pick through before we make a final decision, but we've got overnight to do that analysis. It certainly looks tight in terms of performance; all the teams we are fighting with have shown strong pace at various times today so we're not taking anything for granted but pleased that we seem to be in the fight.

FP1 Result

FP2 Result