FP1 & FP2 - Belgian GP report: Caterham Renault

André Lotterer

“I’m very pleased with today. This morning’s first practice was a good session for me; I got used to the car quite quickly and now I just need to optimise everything in terms of driving style. Considering it was my first time out, it all went according to plan and I was able to get a good feel of what it’s like to drive the car. Now we need to keep working like this and continue improving the car.

FP2 was another good session and everything went smoothly even though we had to stop a little bit early due to a technical problem. It’s definitely been another learning process for me on the option tyre – I went out and I didn’t know what to expect, but I think it went very well. We’ve been able to follow the programme as planned, improving while learning and trying to play with the car slowly. We did some long runs and I’m certainly starting to feel comfortable with everything, even though I’m still in the learning curve.

Marcus Ericsson

“It’s good to be back racing - I’ve been training hard during the summer break and I feel in very good shape. We didn’t have the best of starts, as this morning I had issues with the brakes and a few other technical problems, which is not what we needed. Nevertheless, we were able to complete quite a few laps and gather useful information for the weekend.

FP2 was a better session for us. We solved the issues we had this morning with the brakes, so that was an improvement, even though we will need to solve a few other things overnight, but it’s been a productive day. We’ve completed plenty of laps running on both compounds, so we have a lot of information that will be vital for the rest of the weekend.”

Christijan Albers, Team Principal

“We’ve certainly seen some visible signs that we’re starting to move forward after the summer shutdown. Today we’ve made progress and this is what we intend to do during the rest of the season. Having André in the car is definitely helping us, he has done an extraordinary job on his first day driving for us. We focused on long runs today and tomorrow we will dedicate more time to qualifying performances. It’s been a positive day and we look forward to the rest of the weekend – we will also have an eye on the weather, as here in Spa it can rain at any moment, so anything could happen and we need to be ready.”

Cedrik Staudohar, Renault Sport F1 track support leader

“Spa is the hardest circuit on the calendar for the Power Units so today was a very busy, but productive day. It was very interesting to work with André; he was on the pace straight away, his feedback is excellent and he brings a lot of useful and very different insights to the team. Everything worked as expected until the last few minutes of FP2 when we had a CU-H problem on his car that ended his session early. Marcus also had a good day and everything related to the engine and energy management was managed very well. We’re pretty confident for the rest of the weekend and hope to take advantage of any opportunities that come our way.