Ferrari hopes to repeat Silverstone performance
Two weeks on from the incessant rain in Silverstone, this Friday in Hockenheim was also affected by adverse weather. At least here, the first session was partly spared, but the drops of rain fell intermittently which therefore made the management of the work planned by the Scuderia relatively complicated for this first day of the German Grand Prix.
As usual on Friday, there were a lot of irons in the fire, in terms of updates on the F2012 for this race and for the rest of the season. In total, 78 laps were completed, equivalent to just over 350 kilometres.
Fernando Alonso:
“All in all, I am reasonably pleased with how things went. We ran in various conditions, going from the dry to a damp track and then a completely wet one and tomorrow, at least according to the weather forecast at the moment, we could have a very similar scenario to today when it comes to qualifying. The car behaved well in all conditions, which is always a good thing and we were also able to see how the various types of tyre worked and when was the right moment to switch from one to another. The technical updates on the car? We did not have enough time to evaluate them in depth: let’s hope we can do that tomorrow.”
Felipe Massa:
“As happened in Silverstone, here in Hockenheim the rain also made life difficult. This morning, the conditions were changing quickly and it was hard to get a run of clean laps which were useful enough to evaluate the performance of the new components we brought here. In the afternoon, we did not even get a chance to do a single lap with dry tyres, so we concentrated on understanding the behaviour of the car in the wet. It’s always difficult to give a judgement when you run in conditions like this, but I have to say the car was going pretty well, so we are reasonably pleased. It is even more complicated to say where we are in the dry, because we did not run enough. Let’s see if tomorrow we manage to do a few more laps, but at the moment, the forecast is not very encouraging.”
Pat Fry, Technical Director:
“At least it seems that the rain is not just an English phenomenon this summer! Joking apart, we would definitely have preferred a nice sunny day or at least, a dry track throughout in order to get through all the work programme we had planned for today. Unfortunately, we were only able to do a few laps on the dry tyres this morning, however, not many of these were useful, because the rain kept making an appearance. From what we could see, the car seems to be more or less alright in terms of balance, both in the dry and the wet. Some of the updates we have here proved to be okay right from the start, while in order to evaluate the others fully, we need to analyse carefully what little data we were able to gather today. Tomorrow, the possibility of having another wet qualifying seems quite high, while for the race, it is meant to be dry. At Silverstone, we were competitive in both conditions: let’s hope the same applies here too.”
