|
The Renault team had a difficult first day of practice mainly due to the weather conditions and as such ran all four tyre specifications allocated by Bridgestone at some point in the day. Vitaly Petrov showed some fine form in session one with a fifth placed finish, while Robert Kubica’s top time was good enough for eighth in session two.
Here Alan Permane, Chief Race Engineer gives a technical debrief of the day....
How did the cars perform in the wet this morning?
There were no particular dramas. We ran both types of wet tyre as the circuit required, using the full wet first then intermediates as it dried out. Both cars tended a little bit towards understeer, but there were no major problems, and in fact Vitaly was a bit happier with the car than Robert in the conditions.
The circuit has been resurfaced in places. Were you able to assess how it will affect the tyres?
The conditions made life a bit difficult and meant we have not done as much of an assessment as we would have liked. A lot of the resurfacing has been done at turn six and the circuit took a long time to dry there because the tarmac is very closed.
How are the super-soft and hard tyres performing?
We had a lot of problems with the super-soft compound in Montreal but it looks to be behaving very normally here. However, we were not able to do a great comparison of the two tyre types, because the circuit was still wet in some corners when we ran the hard compound at the start of the second session. Neither tyre looked too difficult to manage, but the hard took a few laps to warm up then just got faster and faster, while the performance was there straight away on the super-soft, but with a touch more understeer.
What is your weather forecast for the rest of the weekend?
At the moment, we’re expecting more rain today, and tomorrow morning may be wet too, but we believe qualifying and the race should be dry. Although the circuit was very green today, we did a long run on the super-soft with no problem at all during the second session, so we’ve got no concerns over the tyres. And we had a predominantly dry session this afternoon to get a handle on the car set-up and understand where we are in terms of performance. |
;)
