FP1 & FP2 - US GP report: Force India Mercedes

Sahara Force India began its preparations today for Sunday’s United States Grand Prix.

Nico Hülkenberg

“I think we can be reasonably happy with our Friday. We did all the work we set out to do at the start of the day and it’s always good fun to practice on a track like this. There was a big shift in conditions between the morning and the afternoon - it was much hotter and there was a very strong wind which was challenging. All in all it was a good day: we will have the usual amount of fine-tuning to do on the set-up and we will need to look at the tyre data to understand how the compounds work, but that’s all standard stuff on a trouble-free Friday. It’s Halloween tonight, so hopefully we’ll get more treats than tricks for tomorrow’s qualifying!”

Sergio Perez

“It was definitely not a bad start for the weekend. We had some upgrades on the car and our main target was to do as much running as possible to assess their effectiveness. We were able to do some good progress on the balance between the two sessions so I am feeling quite positive for the rest of the weekend. There’s still plenty to look at tonight, especially in regard to the two different compounds, to try and squeeze out more performance ahead of tomorrow. I am quite optimistic even if today’s times don’t really show where we stand, but the points are given out on Sunday and that is what my focus is on.”

Vijay Mallya, Team Principal and Managing Director

“It was a very windy day, which makes it hard to assess the balance of the car as the conditions change continuously, but it was the same for everybody so we just have to carry on with our work. We had a very busy day, testing upgrades and collecting lots of data: this is very important as a lot of it will feed directly into our designs for next season. In FP2 we achieved a pretty good balance with our car and we were able to switch our attention to the long runs. Overall it was a very good Friday and we’re looking forward to tomorrow.”