Formula One

Driver quotes from Hockenheim FP1 and FP2-

Sebastian Vettel: “We couldn’t learn too much today, so we just got used to the conditions, as there may be rain tomorrow and also on Sunday. The forecast isn’t looking great. It would have been good to have got some dry running in, especially this afternoon to test a couple of things and see how the car feels – it’s hard to get a proper baseline when the conditions keep changing. We have to carry the extremes into tomorrow and Sunday, so we obviously tried to limit the running on those tyres.”

Mark Webber: “That was a bit unreal. We didn’t expect the rain to be this bad today, but it was quite heavy at times – we even used the extreme full wet tyre. That’s two races in a row now with tricky conditions. We haven’t done much dry running yet, but Sunday looks like it will be better weather-wise. We needed to check what the track conditions were like in terms of grip level, as it’s a different layout here to Silverstone and different asphalt. We tried a few small new parts today. The lap times were all over the place and there were a few incidents, but we got everything we could out of that session.”

Heikki Kovalainen:“We completed a decent mileage today but I think we still have quite a bit of work to do, mainly on finding grip. The conditions in FP1 were good to start off with and we managed to get through most of the aero programme we’d set, including a couple of very slow single lap runs on dry tyres when it was getting pretty wet! In FP2 we started on the full wets for the first run, then went onto the inters but we still couldn’t quite find a really good balance. We’ll look at that tonight and make sure we can push on tomorrow in FP3 and qualifying.”
 
Vitaly Petrov: “I’m pretty pleased with how today’s gone. In conditions like we had in both sessions one of the main things is to make sure you don’t make any mistakes, and we had a big programme for both FP1 and FP2 and it was important to make sure we go through them with no problems.
 
“Inside the car we tried a few setup changes to help dial out the understeer, and on the dry tyres in the morning session we were definitely going in the right direction as the session ended. In the afternoon we tried a few things on both the wets and the inters and, again, made progress, but we have a lot more to come.”

Pedro de la Rosa: “Today was a bit of a strange day, but I’m happy to have been able to run this morning on primes and one last stint on intermediate tyres. That way, if it doesn’t rain in the race, we’ve got a small idea of what we can encounter and if tomorrow the track is wet, which it seems it will be, at least we’ve got an idea of what it can be like. The mechanics did a good job to get the car out today and now we must work on the set-up for tomorrow”.

Narain Karthikeyan: “It wasn’t my best day because I didn’t run in the morning and FP2 was wet. It wasn’t very productive and if tomorrow is dry I will be facing completely new conditions. But it looks like it’s going to rain tomorrow so today’s data will be useful. I expect it to be tough tomorrow but I’m ready for the challenge”.

Dani Clos: “It was an interesting session where I was able to run in dry conditions for a large amount of time, although the track was changing. Some rain drops started to fall which, at times, made it a bit more complicated. But I’m happy with how it went. We did a good job and the car responded well, which is the objective”.