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WHAT WE'VE
LEARNED
* Ferrari driver and championship leader Charles Leclerc set the fastest
time of the day in FP2 (1m19.670s) ahead of Mercedes drivers George Russell
and Lewis Hamilton, all on the P Zero Red soft tyre. Leclerc also went
fastest in FP1, this time ahead of his team mate Carlos Sainz.
* All three tyres were used today, in a conventional run plan that focussed
on the P Zero White hard followed by the soft in FP1, then the P Zero Yellow
medium followed by the soft again in FP2.
* Conditions were warm and dry all day in Spain, with the FP2 session
getting underway in ambient temperatures of 33 degrees and track
temperatures of 45 degrees.
* At the moment, there’s an estimated performance gap of around 1.3 seconds
between the hard and the medium tyre, with a 1.1-second gap between the
medium and soft. Generally speaking, the rate of track evolution in
Barcelona is not particularly high.
MARIO ISOLA - HEAD OF CAR RACING
“The free practice sessions went largely according to expectations: after
Bahrain, this was the first big ‘degradation’ circuit of the year and we saw
track temperatures that peaked at nearly 50 degrees this afternoon, adding
to the challenge: especially for the soft tyre. The front-left tyre was the
one that was most stressed and that’s going to be the limiting factor,
probably leading to a two-stop race for most drivers. How that two-stop is
run will be the big question, with the teams having to manage their tyre
allocation very carefully tomorrow in order to end up with the tyres they
want for the race, bearing in mind also that they have to keep one
obligatory set of medium and one set of hard. We saw some quite big gaps
here between the compounds in free practice, a bit bigger than we expected
this weekend, and that will certainly influence the strategy decisions ahead
as well.” |
