Solid Opening Friday in Budapest

The team opted to revert on rear suspension specification, aiming to re-establish a solid baseline with the W16 after a run of challenging races.

In both FP1 and FP2, the team opted to run the Medium and Soft tyres completing both single lap and long run work.

Whilst the headline laps didn’t put either driver near the top of the timing screens, there were encouraging signs with Kimi’s best lap interrupted by traffic in the final sector.

In FP2, George and Kimi also ran varying set-ups to help identify the best direction for the rest of the weekend.

George Russell

It was a strange day today. Whilst we expected to see the McLarens looking strong, there were some surprises on the timing screens. Aston Martin seemed to have good pace on the single lap and several other cars looked competitive on the long run.

Our focus has been on ourselves though. We’ve re-introduced the previous specification of our rear suspension to find more stability in the car. We didn’t expect to have a major breakthrough moment but overall, the car felt better to drive and gave me more confident. It has therefore been a positive Friday and we will now keep chipping away over the rest of the weekend to secure a solid result come Sunday.

Kimi Antonelli

I’m feeling quite happy after today’s running. The car gave me more confidence than I have felt in recent races, and I feel like I was able to extract more lap-time. We’re still missing a bit of pace compared to those at the very front, but this is hopefully a good platform on which to build. I had a lot of traffic on my best lap on low fuel so we could have been higher up on the timing screens. The long run looked competitive though so definitely a good feeling going into the weekend.

With all that said, Friday doesn’t count for anything. We know how important track position is around here so we will have to do a good job come Qualifying tomorrow afternoon. The field is tight, and we will have to be at our best to give ourselves a good opportunity of scoring solid points on Sunday. That is certainly our aim. We will work hard overnight and look at what improvements we can make ahead of Saturday.

Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director

Our focus today has been on re-establishing a solid baseline with the W16 after introducing some instability in recent races. That has left both George and Kimi struggling to extract the pace relative to the field that we saw in the first six races of the season. We’ve therefore re-introduced a previous specification of rear suspension and, whilst we knew it would be no silver bullet, it seems to have given the drivers more confidence with the car. We also opted to run different set-ups across the cars in FP2 and that has given us a clear direction of focus for the rest of the weekend.

We do seem to have solved some of the recent issues with those changes, but we've got plenty of work to do tuning the balance for both the single lap and long run. We will need to work diligently overnight to ensure we build on today’s work into the rest of the weekend. There is still a healthy deficit to the McLarens at the very front of the pack and several cars who looked competitive behind. There is more pace for us to find and that is now our focus.

FP1 Result

FP2 Result