A busy first day at the Losail International Circuit for the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team. Valtteri was third fastest in the opening session, with Lewis finishing fourth. While Valtteri topped the timesheets in the second session, with Lewis in fourth place once again.
In FP1, Vallteri Bottas completed 24 laps with a fastest time of 1:24.194, +0.471s down on Verstappen’s P1 time. While Lewis managed to complete 21 laps with a fastest time of 1:24.509, +0.786s down on P1 time.
In FP2, Valtteri sets fastest over time with a 1:23.148 lap and managed to complete 27 laps. While Lewis struggled to match his team mate’s best effort, Lewis completed 25 laps with a fastest time of 1:23.570, +0.422s down on team mate’s P1 time.
Lewis Hamilton
“It was a tricky day for me, I don’t know exactly how big the gap is, but I’m definitely a bit off the benchmark. This is a new track, it felt okay to drive, quite nice and no real issues, but it’s all high-speed corners so it’s quite physical.
We have some speed to find but we completed plenty of laps, so that’s encouraging, and it gives us plenty of data to look into tonight. We’ll see what progress we can make tomorrow.”
Valtteri Bottas
“We’ve started the weekend pretty well with the set-up. The balance felt good, so I only made a few minor tweaks for FP2. That’s an encouraging way to start the weekend at a new track, the team did a really good job with their pre-weekend preparations.
It’s not far off the sweet spot, obviously there’s always work to do and improvements to find and even with driving, you can’t find all the speed available in just two sessions. We’ll keep on working. It’s hard to draw conclusions from today, practice is practice, but the feeling is okay and that’s promising for the rest of the weekend.”
Andrew Shovlin, Head of Track side operations
“New circuits are always an interesting challenge as you never quite know what you are dealing with until you start running, but today has gone well and the car seems suited to the track. Valtteri had a smooth day, the pace has been good on low and high fuel and the balance seems to be in the right place.
We decided to start both cars with different set-ups as we weren’t sure how the track was going to be and it looks like Valtteri’s set-up was better suited, so Lewis had to unpick some of those changes going into FP2 and therefore we haven’t yet got his car where we want.
However, we’ve got a good direction to follow, and the tyres seem to be in a good window, we’ve just got to tune the balance a little. Overall a good start but the track is evolving rapidly, and grip is coming up with every session, so we need to make sure that we keep everything in the right place.”
