Brazilian GP: Practice notes - Marussia

23/11/2012

The Marussia F1 Team spent the last Friday of the 2012 season limbering up for Sunday's 'Last Samba', the Brazilian Grand Prix at Interlagos, Sao Paulo.

The Team had a very busy morning session running though the usual aero evaluations and some specific data collection using the Pirelli 2013 development tyre. To effect back to back analysis, Timo focused more on this programme while Charles conducted acclimatisation running at a circuit which, once again, is new for him. They ended the morning in 20th and 22nd positions respectively.

This afternoon, the drivers resumed their normal FP2 programme of set-up work and longer runs to enable them to better understand the tyre behaviour at the Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace, sections of which have been resurfaced for this year. Timo was able to achieve his full programme but Charles was forced to pull over with 20 minutes of the session remaining after an alternator problem cut the engine. They ended the day in 22nd and 23rd positions respectively.

Timo Glock: "It has been a difficult start to the weekend to be honest. As usual it's all about the tyres and we are experiencing a bit of a different behaviour here again. We had quite a bit of oversteer in the car this morning, which was slightly better for FP2. However, at the end of the day we were still struggling with the balance of the car. Overall we concentrated more on race pace and didn't do much for qualifying yet, so we have some work to do tonight when we will try to improve the car and, I hope, make it a bit quicker!"

Charles Pic: "The day started well for me as I completed some aerodynamic testing whilst acclimatising to one last new circuit for me. This afternoon we were focusing rather more on set-up work and the behaviour of the tyres in race-representative conditions. We were not able to get a good read of the option tyre and then unfortunately, towards the end of the session, I had to pull off the track as we experienced an alternator problem. I'm pleased with my long run pace but we have some more work to do to improve our qualifying pace."

John Booth, Team Principal: "A very interesting first day of running at the final race weekend of the season. The work we were able to do this morning with the Pirelli PZero prototype tyre was extremely useful and the information we gathered from that will be fed straight into the development cycle so that we can work on the set-up for winter testing. Timo did a great job with carrying out most of the evaluation work, while we tried to give Charles the opportunity to learn what is another new circuit for him. This afternoon we opted to stay with running the programme which evaluated the tyres in the eventuality of a dry race. Although this seems slightly at odds with the weather forecast, since there were no wet conditions today this is the only thing we could prepare for. We are reasonably happy with the performance of the car on high fuel, although we do seem to be experiencing some quite specific tyre issues at this event. We need to look a little more at our low fuel pace and that's what we will be focusing on this evening."

Check out our Friday gallery, here.