Despite masterclass performances from Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, the seven-time world champion pays the price for Mercedes wrong call on strategy.
Motorsports Racing News & Blog Articles
Both drivers are reasonably comfortable with the car at high fuel, but there is a little more work to do ahead of qualifying.
In general, here things are looking more in line with what we expected compared to the last two race weekends, where we had pleasant surprises.
Now it's about trying to set the car up so its ok in qualifying and it's good in the race, so hopefully we'll manage.
We didn't have the cleanest of laps, due to traffic again, but piecing together the laps the performance is looking encouraging and in line with our expectations.
Neither driver is totally satisfied with where we have the car, so we've got a bit of investigation to do overnight to try and understand how we can get the balance to be a bit more predictable.
Tough first day, tricky conditions playing the biggest part. The temperature made it difficult to keep the tyres in a good window.
The hope, of course, is that we can be somewhere around this region, in the top ten, when we get into qualifying.
We know where we can find gains and there are some things we can do better, which is where we will focus our energy tonight.
The FP2 time was slower than the equivalent session in 2019, mainly due to the stronger winds today, and partly because of some partial track resurfacing.
We faced quite tricky conditions today with some strong winds and high track temperatures, but we can be quite pleased with what we managed to achieve.
Max Verstappen sets the pace in today's second session as Mercedes pair appear to struggle on softs.