Haas F1 Team
Romain Grosjean
“The main item of the day was trying the new brakes. I’m pretty happy with them. I think I’m going to stick with them all weekend long. We’re still not perfect in terms of maps, balance and usage and so on, but the feeling was pretty good. We’ve been struggling a bit with the heat and the temperature of the track, and our afternoon was a little more difficult than our morning. There are a few items here and there to work on to get the car to go faster, but at least we have some direction in where to go and what to do.”
Esteban Gutierrez
“It was nice to get back driving after sitting out FP1. I think it was important just to do our program. It was a little compact fitting it all into FP2, but it went reasonably well in terms of evaluating the car. Now we can improve a lot. I was not very happy with the balance, so we have some work to do tonight to try to put that together. We need to try to optimize everything for tomorrow.”
Charles Leclerc
“It was great to get back into the car. I love the Interlagos track. It’s my first time here. I love the second sector, especially. It’s very interesting. It’s been a long time since I’ve driven a racecar because we’re on a bit of a break in GP3 at the moment, and it’s been even longer since I drove the Formula One car. It was a bit of an adaptation in my first runs this morning, but in the end it all went well. We ran through our program and the team gave me the feedback that I was helpful to them, so that’s all good.”
Guenther Steiner, team principal
“I would say we had an abnormally good Friday, as Fridays lately haven’t been very good to us. Today we had a problem-free FP1 and FP2. In FP1, Charles drove Esteban’s car and Romain his. It went pretty well. We did our program and made progress. In FP2, Esteban was back in his car and we got through our whole program. It seems like as soon as temperatures go up, our car goes slower and we lose grip. I think we know now how to cure this. We still have work to do, but fortunately the forecast has it getting cooler, so that may help us. But we cannot rely on fortune, so everybody’s working hard to see that we get the performance in the car for tomorrow. We also tested different brakes on Romain’s car. They seem to be working fine. We had no issues. We’ll now review if we continue to use them or not.”
