Busy first day for the Scuderia Ferrari
It was a busy day for Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro, with its two drivers completing a total of around 650 kilometres. Felipe Massa did a full Sunday race distance, while team-mate Kimi Raikkonen did five laps more.
First Session
F. Massa: 6th, 1.20.471, 23 Laps, chassis 277
K. Raikkonen: 14th, 1.21.179, 27 Laps, chassis 279
Second Session
F. Massa: 17th, 1.21.005, 37 Laps, chassis 277
K. Raikkonen: 18th, 1.21.132, 38 Laps, chassis 279
Weather
First session: air 22/23°C, track 30/34 °C, cloudy.
Second session: air 25 °C, track 41/37 °C, cloudy.
“It is always difficult to interpret the results of Friday free practice, as we don’t know what schedule the other teams are working to,” commented Stefano Domenicali. “We knew the characteristics of this track would not be ideally suited to our car and now we have to try and analyse all our data from these three hours to see how to improve our performance. We can expect a difficult weekend, but we will do our best, as usual, to bring home a good result.”
Felipe Massa: “I am not very happy with the way these two free practice sessions went. The track was rather dirty and the wind also had an effect. We didn’t manage to find the right way to go to improve the balance of the car. There is definitely a lot of work awaiting us in preparation for qualifying, where the most realistic target at the moment is to get into the top ten.”
Kimi Raikkonen: “Difficult to say where we are in respect to the others: we will have to wait for tomorrow’s qualifying to find out. Clearly, looking at today’s results, we are definitely not in for an easy weekend. The car’s not bad in terms of balance, but doesn’t seem to be quick enough. The tyres are the same as in Turkey, but of course it is much cooler here: on the first lap, the performance between the two types is quite different, but then over a longer run, they tend to be similar. As predicted, there’s a wind blowing on the track, but it’s not as damaging as I’d expected.”
Chris Dyer: “We had a few little problems on both cars: nothing particularly serious but enough to slow us down in completing the programme we had planned for the two drivers. We have various new components on the F60 and now we will have to analyse the car’s behaviour to try and tackle a weekend that certainly looks like being a tough one, in the best way possible.”
