“It is important that we were able to complete our programme without any difficulties today, and both of our drivers did well to adapt to the changeable track conditions. We completed lots of laps, and we have a lot of valuable information which is encouraging at this stage of the weekend.”
Sam Michael [Williams-Toyota – technical director]:
“It was a good afternoon session after we struggled slightly this morning. We tried something new on Nico’s car but it didn’t quite work out as we had wanted it to, so we reverted back to the original plan for the second session, during which everything was fine.
“The engineers and drivers worked through the usual programme today, including preparing the two tyres and working out the best one for the race. We experienced no reliability issues at all and we’ll now work on our qualifying set-up for tomorrow.”
Mike Gascoyne [Force India – chief technical officer]:
“Another productive day for us, with no major mechanical issues on the car. The circuit had a lot less grip than the test last week as we expected, but we worked through our programme of evaluating both sets of tyres and set-up work.
“Conditions in the second session were quite tricky as the wind got up and the track temperature increased, but overall I think we are a lot more competitive than we expected to be, so we should look to have a very strong weekend.”
Steve Clark [Honda – head of race and test engineering]:
“We tested the new package here last week, and have incorporated elements of this into our race weekend specification. The track conditions are completely different today compared to the end of the test, and our task for the remainder of the weekend is to tune the car to find a good balance for qualifying and the race. The only real indication of the step forward that we have made will be in qualifying tomorrow, when we will know whether we have moved forward in relation to our competitors.
