Solid Opening to the Weekend in Barcelona

On a hot and demanding track, Friday was all about data collection and long run work to get a good overview of the car balance, ready for the race on Sunday.

Track temperatures reached 50C in both sessions, with tyre management and preventing overheating a key focus for all teams.

The team ran the Hard and Medium tyres in this first practice session, finishing P11 with George and P18 with Kimi. That strategy was slightly offset to other teams, with only Williams opting for the same approach and thus giving the classification a slight misrepresentative sense.

Both drivers completed single laps on Medium and Soft tyres in the second session and ended with a long stint on the C3 compound, continuing the long run work for Sunday's race.

The FIA has introduced a new technical directive around "flexi wings" from this weekend, toughening the deflection tests on front wing flexibility.

Our Junior Driver Noah Strømsted qualified P8 in FIA F3 and will start tomorrow's Sprint race P5 and Sunday's Feature race P8.

George Russell

I felt good in the car today. Barcelona is a great track to race at, so it was a nice feeling being out there and getting a good number of laps on the board. Our qualifying runs looked decent in the second practice session, and it was nice to be closer to where we hope to be performance wise.

We did a lot of long run work today too and compared to other teams, we weren't quite as competitive as on the single lap. We experimented with some different approaches across our cars though and that gives us plenty of good data to dig through tonight. We will also do the usual overnight work and I'm confident that we can take a step forward tomorrow. Let's see what the next two days bring.

Kimi Antonelli

That was an interesting Friday. My first few laps on low fuel were proving tricky in FP1. I suffered from some bouncing in that first hour, mostly in the high-speed segments of the track. However, everything started to come together in FP2. I felt more confident lap after lap, and I was able to get into a good rhythm on the single runs.

We purposefully adopted a slightly different approach on our long runs to George. We now will take the time to look at all the data we collected throughout the day and evaluate what the right direction is for the rest of the weekend. I can see we are making progress though, and with the overnight work tonight, I'm hopeful we will be able to have a competitive weekend.

Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director

That was a solid day where we were able to complete our programme without any hitches. It's nice to have had two Friday sessions without any red flags or other interruptions. We had purposefully put together a busy plan and thankfully were able to get through all of it.

Our focus for the day was to understand some of our recent long run issues and we had the cars in quite different configurations. There was a good amount that we were able to learn from that, and we will pick through the data tonight and decide what direction to go in and what to carry into tomorrow. As expected, it's very warm here in Barcelona and that weather will remain for the rest of the weekend. Keeping the tyres alive across the stint length is going to be difficult but it should make for an interesting race.

FP1 Result

FP2 Result