British Grand Prix – Friday 8th July 2016. Silverstone, England

Mercedes AMG Petronas

Lewis Hamilton: It’s been a great first day. Lots of positive steps forward with the balance of the car. It’s incredibly gusty out there, which is one of the awesome challenges of this circuit. Coming through Maggots and Becketts then down through Stowe, I was actually yelling in my helmet, it’s that exciting! What a great combination of corners – particularly when the wind is blowing in the right direction. Today we had a bit of a head wind and it just felt epic through there – one of the most fun rollercoaster rides you can imagine. We’ve still got work to do as our ultimate pace could be better. But the long run was good, so if we can keep the car in that window we’ll be in a strong position.

Nico Rosberg; I had a good morning session. It looks like we are quickest out there and that it will be a good battle between me and Lewis. It’s a shame that I wasn´t able to have a run in the afternoon – but I’m sure we can fix the problems by tomorrow morning. I will see what Lewis learned today and try to adapt this for tomorrow and Sunday. It’s great to see that there are so many passionate fans out there and I know a lot of team members from the factories are here too, so I hope they have a fantastic weekend and we can put on a good show for them.

Scuderia Ferrari

Kimi Raikkonen: I’m really happy for the renewal of my contract, I’m happy to be here now and to stay for next year. It’s nice to know that the team believes in me and I believe in them. Now we can put all the effort in the racing and try to achieve better results. On the track it has been a tricky day, conditions were not very easy, there was quite a lot of wind in some places and this was not helping. We are not very happy of where we finished today, but since this morning we have been improving things. We have been working in the right direction all day and I’m sure we can do even better for tomorrow.

Sebastian Vettel: I think it was a bit of mixed conditions this afternoon: it was quite windy, and at the beginning it was not so good. I believe the long run was sort of OK, but we need to have a look and do some comparisons to know where we are. We know that we have lot of work ahead of us for tomorrow to improve the car but, as a baseline for today, we understood and learned quite a lot of things. As for the Halo device I tested this morning, it has quite a lot of impact in terms of visibility.

Red Bull Racing

Daniel Ricciardo: Generally today was really good. It’s always hard to know where the others are but I think we’re pretty happy and the longer runs seemed to be a bit more competitive so we’re getting there. Not a bad Friday. We look fairly good compared to Lewis at the moment but I feel they’ll have a bit more at their disposal tomorrow. I especially wanted to get on top of the race runs today and understand it a bit better, as that was a weakness last week in Austria. I think we’re doing alright. Sunday could be a really good fight with Ferrari for a podium. Hopefully we can make those tyres last a bit longer and get up there.

Max Verstappen: A very good day. I enjoy driving here and we are competitive, although it was a bit tricky in the second session with the wind but that’s the same for everyone. Long run and short run pace was good so we are hoping to be close to the front. You never know what Ferrari or other teams will do but for the moment we are very happy with where we are, it’s a bit of a power track but there are still some corners which suit us. We are not too far off the Mercedes which is always good. There were one or two balance issues so we will make some changes overnight because you always want to be going forward and remain up front. I’m pretty happy but I want to go even faster tomorrow. I think if we can be the second team on the grid that would be very good. Definitely a positive start to the weekend.




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