A solid opening day for
Scuderia Ferrari at the European Grand Prix in Valencia.
At the end of the 180 minutes of track time, Fernando
Alonso set the fastest lap around the 5.419 kilometres
of this street circuit, the Spaniard being the only man
to break the 1m 38s barrier during free practice. In
total, at his second home race meeting after the Spanish
Grand Prix in Barcelona, Fernando completed 57 laps,
which equates exactly to Sunday’s race distance.
In the other 150º Italia, Felipe Massa did two laps
less, ending the day fifth fastest. In between the two
Ferrari men on the time sheet were three world
champions: Lewis Hamilton was second for McLaren, with
series leader Sebastian Vettel third in the Red Bull.
Fourth quickest was the Mercedes of Michael Schumacher
while Jenson Button completed the top six. Interestingly
enough, Fernando was also quickest in FP2 last year and
it’s a sign of how the sport can change from one year to
the next, in that his best lap today (1m37.968) was much
quicker than last year’s 1m39.283.
The street circuit is an interesting mix, with the
priority in terms of car set up being to make it work in
the slower sections, as the fast final one, although
important has fewer corners. Therefore, it was another
very busy opening day of a Grand Prix weekend, as the
Scuderia worked on fine tuning every aspect of the car’s
performance aimed at tomorrow afternoon’s qualifying and
Sunday’s race, as well as working on the car’s on-going
development, which involves testing new solutions. Throw
into the mix a new Pirelli tyre, the Medium compound
which makes its race weekend debut here as the Prime
choice and you have the recipe for very busy scenes and
plenty of activity in the garage.
Friday was the 24th June, which made it a special day
for motor sport fans with a sense of history. Yesterday
would have been Juan Manuel Fangio’s one hundredth
birthday. The great Argentine driver, who died in 1995
took five world titles and one of them, in 1956, came at
the wheel of a Ferrari.
Fernando Alonso:
“Overall, a positive start to this Valencia weekend, my
second home race. We got through all our planned
programme, working mainly on tyres, where the chief
element at this Grand Prix is the first appearance of
the Medium. It was important that we were able to do so
many laps, because on a circuit like this one, getting a
lot of kilometres under your belt helps you gain
confidence in the car, looking for the limits and
thereby improving performance. The track characteristics
are well suited to our car, but it is too early to say
where we are compared to the others. Already, in the
past, we have gone well on the first day only to see
ourselves losing out by a second in qualifying,
therefore I don’t even want to consider today’s time
sheet. In FP1 and FP2 you try so many things and the
track changes very quickly – even more so on a street
circuit like this one – so it is really impossible to
make predictions. The car seems to handle well,
therefore we can tackle qualifying with confidence,
aware that we are up against very strong rivals: it’s
not by chance that Red Bull have always taken pole in
the first seven races of the year and clearly they are
still the favourites. Overtaking here will be easier
than in Monaco, but grid position will nevertheless be
important.”
Felipe Massa: “I’d say it was a good
day, better than many other Fridays this season. From
what we could understand after three hours of free
practice, the car is pretty competitive and I don’t
expect the situation to be that different to the one we
saw two weeks ago in Canada. It’s true it is only
Friday, but at least it’s a positive start! The tyres
worked well: both the Prime and the Option delivered
more grip than we had been expecting going into the
weekend. Sure, there’s a big difference between the two
compounds, but the Medium, with higher temperatures than
we saw in Canada, did not do badly. Now we must make the
right decision regarding set-up on the car for the next
two days. The car balance is not yet perfect – for
example we are still locking the fronts too often under
braking – but we are working in the right direction.
Let’s hope we can put up a fight in qualifying, just as
we did in Canada.”
Pat Fry: “Another busy day’s work,
divided up as usual into working on development of new
solutions and preparing for the race weekend. The track
was not as dirty as expected, which allowed us to gather
a lot of interesting data to evaluate over the next few
hours in order to define our technical choices for the
next two days. We still have to fine tune the car, so it
is still a bit early to say if we will be as competitive
as we were over the past two races. In particular, we
must try and improve our performance in the third and
final sector of the track. The Medium compound tyre
makes its debut here: from what we could see, it offers
less grip than the Soft, which is the other tyre for
this Grand Prix, but we have not yet found out how it
lasts over a long run as we worked mainly with the
Option, as did so many other teams.”
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