Positive start for Honda

The Honda Racing F1 Team kicked off its on-track preparations for Sunday’s British Grand Prix today. All three of the team’s drivers were on-track in both sessions, with third driver Anthony Davidson completing the bulk of the mileage.

As at every grand prix this year, today’s programme was geared towards tyre comparison and set-up work. There were no issues with any of the cars and all three drivers completed their planned mileage.

Neither Rubens Barrichello nor Jenson Button completed significant mileage in this morning’s first one-hour session, ending it in sixth and seventh places. Anthony, by contrast, did 31 laps and finished the session second fastest overall, less than 0.1s slower than Alex Wurz.

In session two, Anthony continued his good work, completing 34 laps, to be fourth overall. The wind picked up this afternoon, which affected the handling of the cars, and all three drivers made small changes to the balance of their cars.

Rubens and Jenson completed 17 and 18 laps respectively, with Rubens – who loves Silverstone and refers to it as ‘Rubenstone’ – ending the session in 10th place. Jenson was unhappy with the balance of his RA106 and ended up 17th, 0.6s slower than his team-mate.

Jenson sported a new colour scheme on his helmet today. By way of support for the England football team in Germany, his lid was painted in the colours of the Cross of St George.

Anthony Davidson "We had a good day in terms of getting through our planned programme and learning about the two different tyre options that we have here this weekend. I feel I did a good job today in making things run as smoothly as possible and getting some really valuable data to look at tonight. I'm confident in the tyre choice for the weekend already and the car has had a nice balance all day, so overall it's been a good Friday."

Rubens Barrichello "It was quite a straightforward Friday for us today. We worked solidly through the two sessions without any real problems. We do need to improve the balance as I was happier with it earlier than I was this afternoon, but we will look at the data and work on that later today. Hopefully we can keep moving forward through the rest of the weekend."

Jenson Button “We’ve been having very strange track conditions here today and in particular it’s very windy, which is causing problems for a lot of the drivers. The balance is not too bad although there is certainly room for improvement, so we’ll see what the data tells us this evening.”