Mercedes had a busy and ‘successful’ day of practice in Barcelona with Nico Rosberg and Michael Schumacher finished, respectively, sixth and seventh on the timesheets, their best lap times separated by approximately half a second.
“It was a good day in terms of set-up and we learned quite a few things about our car,” said Rosberg, who completed 64 laps today. “Of course, it’s difficult to say where we really are because the hard tyres didn’t work so well today and it was very windy. However, we had a nice long run and our preparation with the car is certainly better compared to the last race. The updates are working quite well so far, and thanks for that to the boys in the factory.”
Schumacher completed a couple of laps less than his team-mate and thinks that fifth or sixth place is a realistic target for qualifying tomorrow:
“We have had quite a reasonable Friday and have clearly demonstrated an upwards tendency with our improvements seeming to work well,” commented the seven-time world champion. “Saying that, the other teams have improved too, so without having had a chance to look deeper into the data, I would say that we may be fighting for the third row. We will continue to work further on our performance for tomorrow.”
Team Principal Ross Brawn said that the team still need to find pace from the MGP W02, but was pleased with today’s efforts.
“We have a number of new items on the car here which we wanted to evaluate today, and we have successfully achieved that,” he said. “It was a pretty comprehensive programme and, as always, we will piece together all of the data tonight, and decide how we will approach the rest of the weekend. We’ve got to find some performance on the car, but today was a reasonable start.”
