Scuderia Toro Rosso F1 driver Brendon Hartly is encouraged with his first two practice session on the Baku city street circuit. Winner of the Chinese F1 Grand Prix a fortnight ago, Red Bull driver Daniel Ricciardo topped the second Friday practice session for Formula 1’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix, outpacing Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen by 0.069 seconds.
Hartley finished 12th fastest in Practice 1 and 18th in Practice 2.
“Today was a pretty clean day! It was a new track for me and I had some good fun learning it,” commented Hartley. “I feel like I got up to speed very quickly and I very much enjoyed driving the Baku City Circuit.
“At some times we looked promising – we were in and around the top 10 – but at the end of the day we were towards the rear end of the field. We have some time to find, which means we’ll be working hard tonight to extract the extra tenths out of the car that we need to hopefully make it a few places up the grid.”
Hartley’s team mate Pierre Gasly fared better finishing 9th and 15th in the two practice sessions.
“The first day in Baku – it’s a street circuit so it’s quite challenging,” said Gasly. “It was pretty tricky on my side because we only had four or five good laps in FP1. We had a couple of issues, so I didn’t run much but I’m pretty happy with the car as we ended the session P9.
“It was a good beginning to the weekend even with the track being very dirty. The track then improved in the afternoon but I struggled a bit more. We’re fighting with the balance and the grip and at the moment it doesn’t feel so great. We have some work to do tonight to try and understand how we can improve. It’s so tight between everyone in the midfield, so we’ll have to give it all in FP3 to be ready and get a good result in Qualifying tomorrow.”
Jonathan Eddolls (Chief Race Engineer) explains the challenges that Baku presents the team. “This track has quite different requirements compared to the ones that we’ve been to before, mainly aerodynamically with a straight of 2km, so we brought some new aero components suitable for the circuit.
“This morning it was very dirty, dusty and generally had very low grip so it made it very difficult to get the lap time early on. Actually, you could see the problems were for all drivers with many finding it easy to lock the fronts and go off.
“In addition to the difficult conditions, we had a couple of issues on Pierre’s car. His power unit required a few minor changes and we also tried some different aerodynamic tests. These minor setbacks didn’t allow us to get the best out of his FP1 session which, unfortunately, at a street circuit like this was quite a compromise for him. On the other side of the garage, Brendon had a clean day. We managed to get some mechanical tests completed in FP1, which allowed us to make some further aerodynamic changes going into FP2.
“The track temperature also came down so we had to look to re-optimise where the tyres were working. FP2 went pretty much to plan with no significant issues other than the pace isn’t where we expected it to be – particularly in the long runs. This means there’s quite a bit of work to go through tonight to look to understand how we can improve for tomorrow, as we think we should be a little bit further up on the time sheet.
“A tow is very important around this track, there’s four or five tenths to be gained at least out of the last corner, some cars got those on their quickest laps but our laps were set without a tow. It’s quite difficult to engineer a tow in qualifying, but something to consider. There’s plenty for us to look at tonight.”
Practice 3 and qualifying take place on Saturday (local time).
Comments