Renault also evaluating new blown floor
Renault enjoyed their Friday at Valencia, finding that its new blown diffuser works as expected and is likely to be used for the rest of the weekend. Robert Kubica also tried out a few different set-ups as candidates for the rest of the weekend.
Robert Kubica, R30-03:
Free Practice 1: P4, 1.41.715, 20 laps
Free Practice 2: P6, 1:39.880, 28 laps
"It was a fairly normal Friday for us and we managed to do quite a lot of laps to understand the car and the new developments that we have for this race. It was quite easy to evaluate the new parts and I was able to feel the difference with the car. Track conditions were pretty good, overall: it was quite dusty to begin with, but things improved a lot during the day."
Vitaly Petrov, R30-02:
Free Practice 1: P12, 1:42.962, 17 laps
Free Practice 2: P13, 1:40.618, 29 laps
"I had driven here before in GP2, but today was my first experience of Valencia in an F1 car. Obviously it feels very different and I had to adapt my driving style. We had a lot of new parts to try out so the car felt quite different and I spent the sessions getting used to that and understanding the car’s behaviour. Overall the car felt okay, but we’re still working on the set-up and will continue that tomorrow morning."
Alan Permane, Chief Race Engineer:
Track conditions: For the first session the track was a little bit dirty and we saw the usual track evolution because nobody wanted to run early on. The track was a lot better in the afternoon: a bit warmer and much cleaner, so no real complaints about the conditions in the second session. We saw a lot of cars running off track today, but that’s probably because they were pushing to the limit and making the most of the generous run-off areas, rather than it being down to the track conditions.
Set-up approach: The cars started the day aerodynamically very similar and both cars ran with the new blown floor. By the end of the day they were both running with a reasonably similar set-up, although Robert tried a different downforce level towards the end of the day, which he preferred. We will look at the data tonight to decide whether we will try it with Vitaly tomorrow.
New updates: We had a good look at our new parts today, including our first iteration of the blown floor. The data was encouraging and it seems to be working as the wind tunnel and CFD predicted. We expect to continue running with our updates for the rest of the weekend.
