Sergio Perez doesn’t believe Sauber are looking as competitive as they were at Spa and says they will have to work hard to reach Q3 tomorrow. The Mexican was the quicker of the two drivers in both sessions, squeezing into the top ten, but is concerned by Sauber’s lack of straight-line speed compared to their rivals.
“The first free practice went alright and also in the second session we almost completed our programme, but I had to stop a few minutes early when the team called me in for some checks. Overall so far I have the feeling we are a bit behind expectations here. We lose quite some time on the straights and now have to find a good aero and set-up compromise. We definitely want to fight for the top ten in qualifying tomorrow.”
Teammate Kamui Kobayashi suffered from a relative lack of mileage and is still working to find the right compromise between outright speed and downforce through the middle sector.
“It was a bit of a difficult day. I didn’t do enough running to decide on the settings and the downforce level. In the morning it was business as usual and also my first run in the second session was okay. But then, after we had made some changes, the car was bouncing an awful lot. I nearly spun on the straight. However, we identified the problem but could not fix it during the session. I think we have quite a lot of work to do tomorrow.”
Head of Track Engineering Giampaolo Dall’Ara thought it was a largely routine day for the team although he was frustrated with the niggles that crept in late in FP2.
“The morning’s session was okay. We were focusing on aerodynamics as you always do in Monza because of the special low downforce configuration. We did comparisons of rear wings and other parts. In the afternoon Kamui’s session finished early because we had experienced a problem which we could not solve during the session. Actually after this we are not confident to continue with the planned programme and want to have a closer look at everything now. On Sergio’s car we discovered something wrong on the data shortly before the end of the second free practice and decided to call him in as well.”
