06/06/2014
NEWS STORY
Romain Grosjean and Pastor Maldonado completed a productive first day of running for the Canadian Grand Prix at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve with morning and afternoon programmes yielding progress and a good accumulation of data for the weekend ahead.
We evaluated our Montreal-specific medium downforce package as well as conducting braking and tyre evaluations. Pastor spent time in the garage in FP2 with an unplanned rear wing change. Pirelli's soft (yellow) compound tyre was used in the morning, the soft and super soft (red) in the afternoon.
The latest downforce package appears to be working appropriately. There is potential to unlock further pace from the car for tomorrow.
Romain Grosjean: "We've made good progress with the car since Monaco and the team has made improvements in the areas where we struggled there so that has been a real bonus today. We knew we would struggle on the straights here so we're doing everything we can to make up for that. It looks like we should be able to find some more speed after looking through the data and the weather's due to be hotter so we'll be pushing hard to get into the top ten for qualifying tomorrow."
Pastor Maldonado: "We had a couple of small issues today but we still got a good number of laps completed so we know where we can improve. It's a short lap here so the lap times are very close; I was just two tenths off Romain in the afternoon but that meant 15th rather than 11th on the monitors. We know what we want from the car and what we want to achieve tomorrow in qualifying."
Alan Permane, Trackside Operations Director: "We know this is a circuit which is unlikely to favour the current strengths of our car but within this context we had a decent day of reasonable progress. Romain ended the day just outside the top ten whilst Pastor missed some of the afternoon because of an issue with the DRS on his rear wing, but nevertheless was just two tenths off Romain's lap time. We have a good haul of data to dissect overnight in the interests of unlocking more speed for tomorrow's qualifying."
Check out our Friday gallery, here.