Planet-F1

Fri: McLaren, Red Bull, Williams, STR

Friday 4th July 2008

Heikki Kovalainen set the pace in Friday's British GP practice while Red Bull, Williams and Toro Rosso all featured in the top six.

McLaren
Heikki Kovalainen: We seemed to find a nice balance almost immediately and waited for the track to come to us throughout both sessions. The trick here is to balance the set-up between the high- and slow-speed corners and I feel that we're getting closer to achieving that. We shouldn't get carried away with being fastest on Friday afternoon, but we've got a good basis for Sunday."

Lewis Hamilton: It was good to see so many fans at the circuit so early this morning! Although we'd only tested here last week, the track felt quite different today. The car's balance felt very good despite my having a little grassy moment at Turn Eight. Into the afternoon, the car felt increasingly consistent, and I feel we've got a good benchmark for the weekend ahead."

Red Bull
Mark Webber: Not a bad afternoon session. We had a look at a few different settings, as conditions were not the same as at the test, but that's normal. After a small electronic problem this morning, we had some better running this afternoon when I was much happier with the car. Now we'll wait and see what the weather will do tomorrow."

David Coulthard: A normal Friday. It was good to get some more running time, after missing a lot of track time at the test due to various problems we had there. I didn't have a chance to run the option tyre during the test, so that was my first look at it today."

Williams
Nico Rosberg: After today, I think we can definitely say we had a productive test here last week as we seem to have made good progress. Our main objective for free practice was to focus on tyre comparisons and we seem to have collected some positive results from that. In terms of performance, we should be a step ahead of where we were in Magny-Cours, but we really will have to wait and see."

Kazuki Nakajima: It was going fairly well before the accident. I lost the rear at the exit of turn 12 and just spun into the wall. It's annoying to make such a mistake because it cost me important track time. We'd been having a good run before that, and making good progress for tomorrow, so I also apologise to the team. I will now just keep my head down and look ahead to qualifying."

Toro Rosso
Sebastian Vettel: "Last week's test was the first time I drove this track and I like it, especially the first part with very fast corners and combinations of them. It's good fun and today we had a very productive session, ending up with clear answers on all the things we had on our test list. Therefore we can be quite happy, but now we must analyse what the others did to get a better idea of how quick we are...or how slow! I think we are in a good shape, the balance feels good and I'm happy with that."

Sebastien Bourdais: This morning I had a lot of understeer in the high speed corners and this afternoon we dialled a lot of it out, but that has made the car worse in other areas, so our lap time is no quicker. We will need to look at the data, which we had some issues with also. The track got more slippery as the temperature went up so it was difficult to read what the car was doing, especially as it would change from run to run, maybe partly because the wind was gusting occasionally. We need to look at everything we did today and pick the best set-up. But it might be raining tomorrow, so that will be an additional factor to consider when planning for tomorrow."