Friday: Ferrari starts the weekend very well

Fernando Alonso – 3rd and 1st

Overall, it’s a positive start to the weekend in Valencia, my second home race. We completed the entire program we planned, primarily working on the tires, with the main focus being the introduction of the medium tire for this Grand Prix. It was important for us to be able to do so many laps because on a circuit like this, covering a lot of kilometers gives you confidence in the car, helps in finding the limit, and therefore improves performance. The characteristics of the circuit suit our car well, but it’s too early to position ourselves relative to others. In the past, we’ve had a good first day only to lose ground in qualifying. So I don’t even want to consider today’s timesheet. During free practice 1 and 2, you try so many things and the track changes very quickly—especially on a street circuit—that it’s impossible to make predictions. The car seems to be behaving well, so we can approach qualifying with confidence, aware that we have very strong rivals: it’s not by chance that Red Bull has always taken pole in the first seven races of the year, and they are clearly still the favorites. Overtaking here will be easier than in Monaco, but grid position will still be important.

Felipe Massa – 6th and 5th

I would say it was a good day, much better than other Fridays of the season. From what we can understand after three hours of free practice, the car is very competitive and I don’t expect a different situation from what we saw two weeks ago in Canada. It’s true that it’s only Friday, but at least it’s a positive start! The tires worked well: the mediums and the softs give us more grip than we had hoped for this weekend. Of course, there is a big difference between the two compounds, but the mediums, with higher temperatures compared to Canada, worked quite well. Now, we need to make the right decision regarding the car’s setup for the next two days. The balance is not yet perfect – for example, we’re still locking up the front wheels too often when braking – but we’re working in the right direction. Let’s hope we can compete in qualifying, as we did in Canada.

Pat Fry

Another long working day, split between working on developing new solutions and preparing for the race. The track wasn’t as dirty as we had anticipated, which allowed us to gather a lot of interesting data to evaluate in the coming hours in order to define our technical choices for the next two days. We still need to fine-tune the car, so it’s still a bit early to say if we’ll be as competitive as in the last two races. In particular, we need to try to improve our performance in the third and final sector of the circuit. Medium tires have made their appearance here: from what we’ve seen, they offer less grip than the soft ones, but we haven’t checked their endurance on long stints as we mainly worked on the soft tires, like many teams.