British F1 Grand Prix 2013: Friday's Free Practice Report - A consistent performance for the Silver Arrows

Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton finished the first day of the British Grand Prix weekend in first and fifth places today.

• Nico and Lewis were able to evaluate both compounds of dry tyre during this afternoon’s dry practice session

• Nico completed a heavy fuel long run on the option while Lewis ran the prime tyre for his long run for comparison purposes

• Today marked the third consecutive year at Silverstone in which Friday practice was disrupted by wet weather

Nico Rosberg
“It was a pity for the fans that we didn’t do much running this morning so it was good for them and for us that it was dry this afternoon. On one lap the car is still quick, so qualifying should be okay. But the question mark is our race speed. We practised the race speed today and it felt decent so far. But it could be a completely different picture on Sunday as the weather should be a lot warmer, so we don’t know where we are right now compared to the others. I’m still quite confident that we can have a good weekend in front of our fans, our colleagues and their families.”

Lewis Hamilton
“We had quite a challenging day today and definitely have more to learn tomorrow. I’m struggling a little with the balance of my car so there’s some work to do overnight to get us into shape for qualifying. We haven’t quite got it hooked up yet and you can really tell that on this circuit, particularly with Becketts and Maggots. I’m confident we’ll fix it tomorrow though. It’s great for the British fans here that they were able to see some track action this afternoon after the rain this morning and a big thank you to everyone for sticking with us. Hopefully the weather will improve tomorrow!”

Ross Brawn
“After the wet morning, we had a good session this afternoon and managed to get some useful work done. The conditions today were cooler than we expect for the rest of the weekend, and the track was very green, so we must be careful with the conclusions we draw from our running. The unrepresentative conditions today mean that we will be relying on projections in order to choose the right car set-up for Sunday, so if we get that slightly wrong, we may find ourselves hurting in the race. Today was not too bad in terms of performance and the car had a reasonable balance, which helped us collect some good information on the different tyre compounds with medium and high fuel loads.”

Toto Wolff
“After it rained through first practice, it was good to do plenty of laps this afternoon and we had a decent session. We can’t read too much into the results but we ran slightly different programmes with the drivers to learn as much as possible. Now we need to analyse that data and draw the right conclusions for the rest of the weekend, when we expect quite different conditions to today.”

~ Official photos and report courtesy of MERCEDES AMG PETRONAS ~

Copyright © 2013, Mercedes-Benz-Blog. All rights reserved.