Marussia still not pleased with car balance
Jules Bianchi and Max Chilton ended the day in P20 and P21 respectively at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona today, in the build-up to Sunday’s 66-lap Spanish Grand Prix.
Marussia fielding a new development package here this weekend which they have spent the past two days of practice optimising: "Some changes made overnight paid dividends in this morning’s FP3 session, although there is still work to be done on the balance".
Jules Bianchi, #22, MR02-02: “We had a good Free Practice 3 session this morning and the changes we had made seemed to move us on quite a bit from yesterday. We found more grip but the car is still not well-balanced and this is the most I could get from it today. The balance was quite variable in the first and last sector on different laps and I’m still not happy in the high-speed corners. We need to go through the data and understand what I can do in the race tomorrow to manage these situations. We need a good start to get ahead of Van der Garde but I think we will see some improvement tomorrow in terms of our race pace.”
Max Chilton, #23, MR02-03: “We’re not there yet with the balance of the car but I am pleased with the progress we have made since yesterday. My first lap in particular was strong and I’m definitely feeling the benefit of not having lost track time this weekend. I feel like I’ve been able to demonstrate more of my progress. I’m really looking forward to the race now.”
John Booth, Team Principal: “We were pleased that the analysis we did overnight on our upgrade package showed that we continue to enjoy good correlation with our development tools. The upgrades we have for this race have certainly brought more performance to the car and last night the feeling was that if we’d had more time to work on the developments during FP1 and FP2 there would be more to come. We haven’t really found a great balance on the car yet, however we did have a very positive FP3 session where we made good improvements to the car. Jules was unable to get a good lap together in qualifying due to a difficult balance and Max had to be a bit more aggressive on his out lap due to traffic to find clean air. So neither driver quite got the lap they wanted today but it’s good to have them so close to each other and I think we can look forward to a good race tomorrow.”
