The Red Bull Ring, home of Red Bull Racing team set to host the second leg of back-to-back races in Austria and tail end of first triple header.
Last weekend saw a dominant display by Max Verstappen and Red Bull, who claimed pole position and cruised to victory by more than 30 seconds.
Mexican Sergio Perez missed out on a home race double podium by just 0.5 seconds, after a strong stint on medium tyres following his second pit stop.
In the first practice session Max carried on where he left off from on Sunday, finishing P1 with a best time of 1:05.143. He completed 36 laps. Perez ended the session in P8, setting a time of 1:05.726. The Mexican completed 31 laps in total.
Friday’s afternoon Free Practice Two, saw Max bring his RB16B home in P3. The Dutchman set a time of 1:04.740 and completed 35 laps. Perez ended the day in P11 with his fastest time a 1:05.516. He managed 39 laps of the Red Bull Ring.
The only difference for the Austrian Grand Prix from Styrian GP is the tyre compounds. These are one step softer this weekend, which sees Pirelli bring the C5 – the softest in their range – to the Red Bull Ring for the first time. Also on offer for the teams are the Medium C4 and Hard C3.
Max Verstappen
“From our side we didn’t have a perfect run in FP2 but nevertheless I felt good in the car and there are no real problems.
Mercedes looked quite quick on the soft so we just have to make sure we have a little more pace on that compound because we looked stronger on the medium and in the long runs, which at the end of the day is the most important for the race.
We also tested the new Pirelli prototype tyre which seemed to be fine. It did get quite greasy out there but luckily it was good enough to keep on driving so we had a good read on the long run pace.
I think it will be tight again this weekend as it looks like Mercedes improved a bit but we will see tomorrow in qualifying and the most important thing is to make sure we look after the softer compounds in the race.”
Sergio Perez
“The long runs were definitely more promising today but there’s still a lot of work to do. Both sessions were quite tough and I’m not feeling fully comfortable with the car on the softer compound yet.
We need to analyse the data tonight to try and get the pace back to where we would expect it to be, ready for qualifying tomorrow.
We seemed to be quite far away from the balance with the low fuel but we corrected that quite quickly, we were also seeing less degradation on these tyres too which is good.
It’s good to see Pirelli bringing a new tyre to test this weekend before we use them at Silverstone. Overall, I learnt a lot from today and it’s great to see all of the fans here at the Red Bull Ring and hopefully we can have a good qualifying tomorrow and a solid race on Sunday.”
