Nico Rosberg and Michael Schumacher were both pleased with the performance of their Mercedes around Canada in the two practice sessions today despite finishing the second down in P19 and P20 respectively.
Two red flags in FP2 this afternoon required the team to modify their programme to focus only of high-fuel race preparation, hence the reason that their lap times were slower than all but the Virgin and Hispania cars.
The team will draw plenty of positives from their positions on the timesheets in FP1 though – P1 for Rosberg and P3 for Schumacher – and the fact that they completed 128 laps today.
“It was a positive start to the weekend, and we seem to have made some progress with our race pace,” said Rosberg. “I felt comfortable with the car today and we completed a lot of laps despite the interruptions, which was good. The tyres are holding up well so it will be interesting to see the comparison once we start working on low fuel tomorrow. Overall, I’m quite happy.”
Schumacher also noted how productive the day had been for the team, describing it as ‘encouraging. “We covered quite a lot of work today,” said the seven-time world champion. “Obviously we didn’t do any times on lower fuel and just concentrated on high fuel due to the red flags shortening our programme this afternoon. That’s why we are at the opposite end of the timesheets to this morning, when it looked encouraging for a weekend that we did not enter with the highest expectations. We will now sit and analyse our performance and hope for another encouraging day tomorrow.”
