Then on top of that come the updates that are part of the Scuderia’s constant development of the F2012. Yesterday, the most significant element was a new exhaust system, which was back-to-backed with that used at the previous two races. As you can tell, the workload is building up and that’s before we even get onto the usual tasks of evaluating tyres and finding the right balance to ensure tyres and brakes, which get a time here, can work at their best.

Both Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa were pleased with what they accomplished yesterday and the Brazilian actually described it as his best Friday of the year. Perhaps that’s not surprising, as he finished the day third fastest, just one tenth of a second slower than his Spanish team-mate, who in turn was a miniscule 0.054s off the pace of the fastest man today, Lewis Hamilton in his McLaren. Sebastian Vettel was fourth for Red Bull, with Paul di Resta next up for Force India while Kamui Kobayashi completed the top six in the Ferrari-powered Sauber. Even if it’s traditional to dismiss Friday’s lap times, it is a good start in terms of pace, while when it comes to reliability, Fernando completed 70 laps, which is exactly the same as Sunday’s race distance and, running a different programme, Felipe did 56. The rain tried to affect the morning session but failed, while yesterday afternoon, a ferocious storm hit the track, thankfully five minutes after the end of the session. Forecasters reckon Montreal has now seen the last of the rain for the weekend, with a hot race day in prospect.

Fernando Alonso: “I am rather pleased with the way things went this Montreal Friday. This morning, we concentrated mainly on evaluating some new updates, while in the afternoon, we worked principally on a comparison of the two types of tyre, looking for performance over a single lap and also to check the behaviour of the car with a lot of fuel on board. The first indications seem to be positive, but it is much too soon to draw any conclusions as Friday times should never be taken at face value. Now we must concentrate on analysing the data and prepare as well as possible for the rest of the weekend. The circuit named after Gilles Villeneuve is very similar to a street circuit, with the walls very close to what are normal roads. It therefore becomes very important to find the right reference points, especially in terms of braking points and how far one is from the walls, in order to put together both a quick lap and to drive smoothly over a long distance.”

Felipe Massa: “It was a very positive Friday for us. We managed to do a lot of laps and, above all, test everything we had on our programme. Fortunately, the rain, and boy did it rain, arrived just after the second session had ended, so we managed to do everything properly. I think we can be happy with the fact that the updates we have brought here worked, even if it’s hard to give an instant assessment of how much of an improvement they have produced. In any case, the intention is to keep the car in this new configuration. The car seems to be well balanced and it seemed to me to be pretty consistent in terms of performance, even if, obviously, the track is not yet providing much grip, this being the first day of the race weekend. To sum up, this has been the best Friday of 2012: let’s hope that can continue through Saturday and Sunday as well!”

Pat Fry: “We had a lot of work to get through today and we were worried the rain might come, which could certainly have made life complicated. Fortunately, the expected storm hit immediately after the end of the second practice session, so that we were able to get through everything we had set ourselves to do. We brought two different exhaust configurations here: one was the one used in the last two races, the other represents our latest interpretation of the concept that was part of the car when it made its debut in Jerez. From what we could see today, the latter configuration seems to be positive in terms of performance even if, obviously, we need to analyse the data very carefully to make the right choices for the race. This track requires a rather different downforce level to those we have visited so far, so we also worked a lot on this front and, in this case also, we need to study the data we have acquired before making a judgement one way or the other. Finally, we had to check the behaviour of the tyres, especially the Supersoft, over a long run: we did not manage to do that many laps and, also linked to this aspect is the unknown factor relating to temperature. In fact, the weather forecast for Sunday suggests an increase in track temperature of around ten degrees, which could completely change the situation compared to what we have seen today. Therefore there is a lot of work to do over the rest of the weekend, but at least we have got off on the right foot.”