FP1 & FP2 - Spanish GP report: Mercedes

Bright start for the Silver Arrows in Barcelona

— Nico Rosberg finished the morning session third fastest, with Lewis Hamilton in P4
— Nico Rosberg ended the day with the fastest time in the afternoon session, while Lewis Hamilton was third quickest
— Both drivers ran the medium compound tyre during FP1 and the medium and soft compound tyres in FP2

Nico Rosberg

It’s great to be back in Europe and to be back in Spain. It was a good start for us today with two good practice sessions. Times were looking good on the longer and also on the shorter stints. I feel very comfortable with the car with some new parts added and they seemed to have worked well. Ferrari also look very strong around this circuit so I’m looking forward to Saturday’s third practice session as well as qualifying and to seeing how we can perform out there.

Lewis Hamilton

That wasn’t an easy day for me, I struggled with the car balance through the day and this afternoon in particular it felt really tricky to drive. I had traffic on my quick lap, so the lap times don’t tell the full story, but it’s clear we have plenty of work to do this evening to get the car driving like I want it to. But we will get our heads down this evening, work through the data and I’m confident we can pull things around for tomorrow.

Paddy Lowe, Executive Director (Technical)

This is a circuit we know well after completing nearly 1,300 laps during pre-season testing and that makes it all the more surprising when we struggle to balance the car well on the race weekend. But the conditions are of course much warmer than back in March, and this presents a different set of engineering challenges. We completed a regular programme with both drivers but the balance was not perfect on either car and there’s still plenty of work to do in order to get the car handling how we want on the medium and soft compound tyres. We conducted a comparison of a new front wing design across both cars in first practice, which delivered the expected results. Our performance is quite close to Ferrari and we will therefore be working hard overnight to optimise the car set-up and performance for qualifying and race conditions.