No major engine upgrades for Ferrari at Silverstone

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Kimi Raikkonen has played down suggestions that Ferrari have brought a major engine upgrade to this weekend's British Grand Prix.

"This is just a new engine, basically normal things," he clarified on Friday, where he was third fastest on the timesheets behind the two Mercedes cars.

"A fresh engine tends to be a little better than a used engine," he acknowledged, insisting that was all. "No major things, but something that was obviously planned already.

"Hard to say from today where we are [compared with other teams]," he added. "[Mercedes] are a bit ahead of us, but tomorrow we try to get better. We'll see what we can get.

Raikkonen added that the gusting wind had made things a bit tricky at times, but that this was normal for Silverstone.

"It was a bit more straightforward session than on other occasions, and we had no issues," he continued. "Obviously at the beginning there was a bit of guesswork with the conditions, as always when you first run at a track.

"Tomorrow will be a different day. We can only try to do our best and I’m sure we can improve. In qualifying and mainly on Sunday we’ll see if it is enough."

Bottas continues to narrowly set the pace in FP2

Raikkonen's team mate Sebastian Vettel started the day with a trial of the new shield head protection device. After that he said the day had been "a bit mixed of ups and downs."

"On Friday you don’t seek much the performance and this new engine has a lot of miles to do, so we try to save it.

"It’s working well and we didn’t have problems," he added. "But we still have to do more and to improve. We have a lot of things to look at.

"Mercedes looks quick but it’s not a surprise. The track today was too slippery and tricky, but I think we can get better tomorrow."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.