Charles Pic doesn’t believe Friday provided any real surprises for the Caterham after they ended the day with the slowest car on the track. The Frenchman was half a second behind Jules Bianchi’s Marussia but wasn’t too disappointed with the feeling of the CT03 around Albert Park.
“For our first full day of running that was ok. We definitely have work to do to get where we want to be and we knew where we’d be relative to the cars around us for the early part of the season, so there’s been no real surprises today.”
“In FP1 we ran through a pretty normal program on the medium tyres but we have some work to do to extract the maximum performance from them so we’ll look at that tonight and do more work on that in FP3. In FP2 we did a couple of longer runs on that compound before switching to the supersofts and found that deg levels on those was good, especially on the long runs, and the times were consistent. Now we need to make sure we can get the same performance level out of the mediums as we did on the supersofts and that will set us up ok for Sunday.”
Teammate Giedo van der Garde was the slowest driver overall but only managed eleven laps in the afternoon due to a mistake at turn three which left him beached in the gravel, something the Dutchman is keen to learn from.
“First I want to say how good it was to start my first full F1 weekend. I’ve worked very hard for a long time to get here and a lot of people have helped make my dream come true, so I want to thank them for helping make it happen.”
“On track FP1 was good – we got through a decent number of laps and focused mainly on tyre evaluation, running on the mediums for the whole session so we could have a detailed look at degradation levels on that compound. FP2 started ok – on the first run I had some understeer that we dialled out for the second run but unfortunately I have a bit of rear locking as I went into T3 and went into the gravel. The anti-stall kicked in before I could get the car back out and that was the end of my afternoon. Despite that we have a lot of data to work through tonight and we’ll come back fighting tomorrow. We’ll have to make the most of FP3 but I’m looking forward to it and it’s all part of the learning process for me.”