#AlphaTauri – R03 HUNGARIAN GRAND PRIX – FRIDAY 17-07-2020

Pierre Gasly (AT01-04, Car 10)
First Practice Session
Best lap: no running
Second Practice Session
Best lap: 1:42.588, pos. 6th, 7 laps
“It wasn’t a very productive day for us. We got no running this morning due to an issue on the car which cost us quite a bit of time. The afternoon session was wet so we just did a few laps, which is obviously not ideal considering we couldn’t run in FP1. There is still another practice session tomorrow morning, which should be dry, so that we can set-up the car for Quali. We’ll try to work with Dany’s data from this morning to try and have a better day tomorrow.”

Daniil Kvyat (AT01-03, Car 26)
First Practice Session
Best lap: 1:18.292, pos. 16th, 35 laps
Second Practice Session
Best lap: 1:47.422, pos. 13th, 7 laps
“We had a few things to test this morning on dry tyres. We had the feeling there was room for improvement and we were looking forward to making some changes to improve for FP2 but then it became wet, so we could not proceed as planned. We did a few laps to check the car behaviour in wet conditions, when it’s very important to make the tyres work and it seems like we didn’t manage it, as I was sliding quite a lot. We will have to analyse all the data and get ready for tomorrow.”

Guillaume Dezoteux (Head of Vehicle Performance)
“FP1 was a difficult one for us today as only Daniil could hit the track and run because of an issue on Pierre’s car.
The first baseline run was tricky in terms of balance as the car was suffering some understeer in most of the corners.
The long run consistency looked quite ok but again, we had a significant level of understeer and some front tyre graining started to appear on the medium compound. As for competitiveness, we were not really where we wanted to be, but we didn’t put a clean lap together when the tyres were at their peak. We have seen many cars having heavy front tyre graining on the soft tyre and this could play an interesting role going forward in the weekend and during the race if it’s dry.

During this afternoon’s second session, we had quite a lot of rain. We did an installation lap on car 10 to check that the repairs done over lunch were effective. It was a track for full wet tyres at all times and the running on intermediate tyres was only to get the set replaced for tomorrow. Both drivers struggled with grip and balance. To be able to have a proper read on balance and performance, we would have needed more laps, but this goes against saving the full wet tyres for Qualifying and the race in case it rains again. We have a lot of homework to do tonight and we will do our best to improve our cars for tomorrow.”

Toyoharu Tanabe (Honda F1 Technical Director):
“We knew from the forecast earlier this week that we could expect bad weather for the weekend in Hungary and it was proved correct today. There was just light drizzle before FP1 so the cars were able to use slick tyres, however, for FP2 the conditions were much worse with heavy rain, therefore none of our cars did much running. We will therefore have to use our time very effectively in tomorrow morning’s FP3 to work on our PU settings for qualifying and the race. In FP1, we spotted an anomaly in the data from Gasly’s PU and, as a precaution, we changed some components and it ran trouble-free in FP2.”