Kevin Magnussen looked for the positives in his Friday running, even though rain and a water leak hampered his and the Haas F1 Team’s day.
Magnussen recorded the eleventh fastest time in Free Practice one but – like team-mate Romain Grosjean – chose not to run in the rain hit Free Practice two session.
Nonetheless, the Dane felt happy in the feeling coming from his car, but feels that there is some needed performance to be gained for tomorrow and Sunday, as he looks for his first points since Azerbaijan.
“It was feeling good straight away, so we were happy about that.” said Magnussen.
“I think we need to try and find some more speed, for sure, because other people are going to be doing that.”
“If we’re aiming to score points this weekend we need to get it right.”
Magnussen’s limited running puts him on the back foot relative to everyone else, only managing 15 laps – one more than Scuderia Toro Rosso’s Carlos Sainz Jr., who crashed out of the morning session on the exit of the Turn 11 hairpin.
Yet the 25-year-old – who celebrated his birthday yesterday – is hopeful that he can make up for lost ground.
“I had the issues with the water leak and I could only do one lap per run. So, I didn’t get that much running, but hopefully we can catch up.”
Team Principal Guenther Steiner echoed Magnussen’s pleasure with the pace shown in FP1, before confirming that the water leak issue was resolved in time for Practice 2, should Magnussen have wished to run.
“We had a pretty good Free Practice 1, though it’s still too early to say how good.”
“We had just a small problem with Kevin’s car. We couldn’t do more than a few laps because of a small water leak, which we sorted out for FP2.”
“Unfortunately, it rained a lot in Free Practice 2, so we didn’t do any more running. We’re now looking forward to tomorrow.”
