Stoffel Vandoorne felt his Friday at the Hockenheimring was his worst Friday he’s had in a Formula 1 car for a very long time after the Belgian ended both Free Practice sessions at the back of the field.
The McLaren F1 Team racer completed only fourteen laps in the morning session but ended 2.624 seconds off the pace of Aston Martin Red Bull Racing’s Daniel Ricciardo, with Vandoorne testing a number new parts across the session.
He completed thirty-four laps in the afternoon but was unable to pull himself off the bottom of the time sheets, with Vandoorne feeling that, like at Silverstone two weeks ago, that something was not right with his MCL33, which feels is compromising his performance, which is particularly frustrating with so much uncertainty surrounding his future with the team for next season.
“This morning we did a lot of testing of new parts on the car to understand them a bit better, so we didn’t have much running in the first session,” said Vandoorne. “We were doing some learning work for the team, and it has been beneficial to understand them for the future.
“In the afternoon, we again had a difficult session. This has probably been my worst Friday for a long time – I had a similar feeling to what I had at Silverstone, that something isn’t working properly on the car.
“We can see that the car is not in its normal conditions, and at the moment it’s a bit of a question mark for us to firstly put the car back to a position where it behaves normally, and then to see how we’ll get on, on Saturday.
“There’s going to be a lot of data analysis tonight to understand how to get the car back in normal conditions for tomorrow, and we’ll probably change quite a lot of parts on the car.
“If the rain comes tomorrow, it’ll be good news for us.”
