Fri: STR, Sauber, Williams, Renault

It was a sluggish Friday for Williams, who joined Toro Rosso, Sauber and Manor at the bottom of the Belgian GP timesheets.

Toro Rosso:
Daniil Kvyat: “We were able to complete our programme today and we tried most of the things we wanted, so we have a lot of data to go through for tomorrow. We will now study as much as we can in order to improve, as today wasn’t an easy day at all and there are still some areas where we certainly need to progress. We will try our best to do that!”

Carlos Sainz Jr: “It’s been a tough Friday. Our main target has been to try and compensate our lack of top speed here in Spa. We are definitely struggling at this track, as there are so many up-hill and flat-out sections… But what we need to do is to just keep working hard – at the moment we don’t look very good and even though we knew this weekend was going to be a challenge, we expected to be a bit higher up than where we are now.”

Sauber:
Marcus Ericsson: “It was an interesting day, obviously because of the aero package we introduced here in Spa. My initial feeling is that there are some improvements. We need more time to try different configurations in order to optimise the package and see how it works in the best possible way. It was a good first day with the new package. Tonight we will anaylse the data collected to get a better understanding. We will see how it works when it counts tomorrow.”

Felipe Nasr: “Today the main focus was on evaluating the new package. In the morning we did many scans, analysing different configurations on the aerodynamic side. We could already see some benefits from the package, which is positive. In FP2 we were then able to concentrate more on short and long-runs on soft as well as supersoft tyres. From a technical point of view, my top speed has been compromised because of misfires. I am optimistic that this issues will be sorted out by tomorrow.”

Williams:
Valtteri Bottas: “We had a small issue in FP2 with the ECU so we had to change it. We lost about half an hour there but otherwise it was a good day. It’s great to be back in the car again after the summer break. I really enjoyed it out there today. The car felt decent but I’m sure we can still fine tune the balance and make the car quicker. Our long run pace, compared to the others, wasn’t too bad but I think we still need to find everything there is to find. With these temperatures it’s very tricky on the tyres and there’s a lot of overheating, but it’s the same for everyone.”

Felipe Massa: “It’s clear that we’ve had a very disappointing Friday. It was difficult to get the car working in both the short runs and long runs, and in different set-ups. We’ve got a lot of work to do tonight to try and understand why the car wasn’t working in the way we expected. It’s going to be a very long evening but I hope we fix today’s issues.”

Renault:
Kevin Magnussen: “We are not where we would like to be here and it looks like it will be a tough quali tomorrow. Tyre degradation seems to be the biggest issue, but I think everyone was suffering as well. The balance is not as predictable as I would like and we are lacking rear grip at the moment so we will look at everything now. I think we can make our normal progress, and we will do our best as always. We have the tools to improve and in the race anything can happen so you need to give it everything you can.”

Jolyon Palmer: “We had a couple of issues but we worked through what we wanted to do. I missed the last run but everything else was relatively fine. We didn’t lose very much in the afternoon in the end. The car feels OK and I think we found a reasonable baseline with it so it’s just about fine tuning for tomorrow and adding some performance. We are not expecting to be super-quick here this weekend but we can still find the sweet spot. We’ll work hard tonight and come back again tomorrow with some improvements.”