Mercedes had a very good Friday practice session, leading First session P1 & P2 ahead of title rivals Red Bull.
Historically Austin track suits Mercedes better than rivals but by going with Friday timings, it will be very tight between Red Bull and Mercedes at the top during qualifying and Sunday’s race.
Valtteri set the pace in the first practice session, finishing just 0.045s clear of Lewis in P2. The Fin completed 17 laps with a fastest lap time of 1:34.874. While Lewis completed 18 laps with a fastest lap time of 1:34.919.
Lewis was third fastest in second practice, narrowly finishing ahead of Valtteri in P4. The Brit completed 22 Laps with a fastest time of 1:35.310, +0.364s down on session leader Checo Perez. Valtteri managed to complete 23 laps with a fastest time of 1:35.360.
Valtteri Bottas
“I think we have a good car here and even with my five-place grid penalty, we can still have a good race from wherever I end up starting. Today showed it is pretty close at the front but it’s still all to play for. Because of the penalty, the main thing for me was focusing on the long-run pace and that’s what we did, especially in FP2.
There’s still a lot of work to do with the set-up, as it wasn’t easy to drive and, in some places, the track has lost quite a lot of grip, so the balance was inconsistent. But we’ll look at the best options tonight and see what we can do, because I will be racing other cars and need to overtake if I want to make it to the podium and fight for the win.”
Lewis Hamilton
“Generally, it’s been a good day but there’s still work to do. The first session was really good, but I made some changes for FP2 and I wasn’t as happy with the car. The pace wasn’t bad, but I think we lost a bit of ground to everyone, so we need to dig into the data tonight and figure out why.
The surface here feels rougher and that means it’s a struggle to keep the temperature out of the tyres, so there’s more degradation than we’ve experienced before. It’s been a productive day so we have plenty of findings that we should be able to navigate well and improve for tomorrow.”
Andrew Shovlin
“The first session was very good in terms of single lap pace; both cars were getting good grip out of the Soft tyres and the balance was in a good place. The track is pretty bumpy, which causes issues in a couple of corners, but it’s not so different to previous years and certainly not as bad as we feared. The second session didn’t look as strong, it was easy to overheat the tyres and that was making it harder to be consistent.
Lewis had a lap deleted that would have us looking more competitive, but regardless, it seemed like we’d lost a bit of pace. That could be down to a number of things; perhaps we’d not adapted to the hotter conditions well, others may have improved, or it could be that some of our changes haven’t worked as expected. It’s useful to have found a few issues that we can get stuck into this this evening as there’s plenty we can do to improve, but the overall feeling from the second session is that it’s going to be very tight at the front and both Red Bulls are looking like they are in the fight for pole.”
