Charles Pic believes Caterham are in good shape for this weekend’s British Grand Prix although he didn’t enjoy the smoothest of Fridays at Silverstone. The Frenchman crashed at Club in the heavy rain of FP1 but thankfully that didn’t disrupt his afternoon programme and he would go on to finish twentieth, one place behind teammate Giedo van der Garde.
“We knew from the forecasts that FP1 would be affected by the weather but it made the whole session pretty worthless”, commented Pic. “The installation lap was fine but then we waited until about ten minutes to go when there were quite a few other cars on track and unfortunately I went off in the last corner. We obviously didn’t lose much time relative to the other cars as everybody had stayed in the garage, and when we got the car back we found everything was ok so it didn’t affect our preparations for FP2. FP2 was dry, still colder than it looks like it’ll be on Saturday or Sunday, but we completed a good number of laps and have a lot to work on tonight. We’ve found a balance I’m happy with and the grip levels are good from the out lap – we need to work on the low speed traction as we’re lacking a bit in that area, but deg levels look manageable, especially with the prime, so overall I think we’re going ok here.”
Van der Garde was also encouraged by the pace although he feels the team need to iron out some oversteer from the car to get the best out of the option tyres in qualifying.
“The morning session was obviously affected by the rain which is a shame, both for the fans who packed out the stands, and for us with the plan we’d set for FP1. We wanted to run through a few aero evaluations, particularly as we have a couple of new updates to the floor here, but with the track as wet as it was, and no sign of the rain stopping, we played it safe in the morning. In the afternoon it was much better weather and we had a pretty good session. We had to try and make up some of the time we lost in FP1 and, while we couldn’t run the full aero tests, we were still able to make some decent progress throughout the session. The GP2 cars had helped dry the track a bit so we were able to push from the first run and we ended up with a fairly good balance on both compounds. We’re seeing a bit too much oversteer on the mediums, especially in the low speed corners, but not in the high speeds – there the car feels balanced and that’s positive, something for us to work on tonight.”
