Ferrari pleased with Friday practice

Saturday 9th June 2012

Ferrari pleased with Friday practice

Ferrari pleased with Friday practice

Fernando Alonso, Felipe Massa and Pat Fry were all satisfied with Ferrari's efforts during Friday's two practice sessions in Montreal.

Alonso and Massa finished the day in second and third after completing 70 and 56 laps respectively, while Ferrari also managed to complete its work programme, which was focused on an evaluation of two different types of exhaust and checking the behaviour of the two compounds brought here by Pirelli, the Soft and the Supersoft.

"I am rather pleased with the way things went this Montreal Friday," said Alonso.

"This morning, we concentrated mainly on evaluating some new updates, while in the afternoon, we worked principally on a comparison of the two types of tyre, looking for performance over a single lap and also to check the behaviour of the car with a lot of fuel on board.

"The first indications seem to be positive, but it is much too soon to draw any conclusions as Friday times should never be taken at face value. Now we must concentrate on analysing the data and prepare as well as possible for the rest of the weekend."

Technical director Pat Fry was also encouraged by what they had achieved.

"We had a lot of work to get through today and we were worried the rain might come, which could certainly have made life complicated," said Fry. "Fortunately, the expected storm hit immediately after the end of the second practice session, so that we were able to get through everything we had set ourselves to do.

"We brought two different exhaust configurations here: one was the one used in the last two races, the other represents our latest interpretation of the concept that was part of the car when it made its debut in Jerez.

"From what we could see today, the latter configuration seems to be positive in terms of performance even if, obviously, we need to analyse the data very carefully to make the right choices for the race. This track requires a rather different downforce level to those we have visited so far, so we also worked a lot on this front and, in this case also, we need to study the data we have acquired before making a judgement one way or the other.

"Finally, we had to check the behaviour of the tyres, especially the Supersoft, over a long run: we did not manage to do that many laps and, also linked to this aspect is the unknown factor relating to temperature. In fact, the weather forecast for Sunday suggests an increase in track temperature of around ten degrees, which could completely change the situation compared to what we have seen today. Therefore there is a lot of work to do over the rest of the weekend, but at least we have got off on the right foot."

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