Kevin Magnussen says he is amazed and impressed that his Haas F1 Team can still find pace in the VF-22 despite the car not having any updates applied to it.
The Dane was only seventeenth in first practice for the French Grand Prix on Friday but jumped into ninth in the afternoon, and he hopes the pace can improve further on Saturday at the Circuit Paul Ricard.
Magnussen is excited by the prospect of the upgrades the team are developing, and he believes they will be able to make another jump forward when they are introduced.
“I don’t think it was a bad day,” said Magnussen. “We made a decent jump from FP1 to FP2 – it didn’t look so good in FP1 – but then we made some changes and found some pace. Hopefully that carries into tomorrow and we have a good FP3, going into qualifying.
“It’s very impressive how the team is finding pace in the car despite no upgrades so I’m very happy about that and I’m excited to see what the car will be like when we do get upgrades.”
“The car felt good this morning, a bit worse this afternoon” – Mick Schumacher
Team-mate Mick Schumacher was unable to find the same kind of pace jump in second practice, although he did not have a clean lap on the soft tyres to get a truly representative lap time on the board.
The German was sixteenth in the morning session and nineteenth in the afternoon, with Schumacher feeling he lost some of the pace he had in the VF-22 in the second session, something he hopes the team can rectify ahead of Saturday’s running.
“Sometimes you want to try and go to the limit and that’s what I did and carrying a lot of speed into that corner is helpful in terms of lap time and in that sense maybe it was a bit too much,” said Schumacher.
“It’s a bit unfortunate as that meant we were on the short side for tyres on the long run but on the other hand you’ve got to try.
“The car felt good this morning, a bit worse this afternoon, so we’ll be analyzing why and trying to figure out how we can make it better but I don’t see a reason why we can’t get it back into the window tomorrow.”
