FP1 & FP2 - Abu Dhabi GP report: Sauber Ferrari

The practice sessions ahead of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix went according to plan for the Sauber F1 Team. As the final race of the season starts at sunset and finishes in the dark, the FP2 session was more crucial in terms of temperatures and track conditions for Sunday as well as for qualifying tomorrow. As usual, the second free practice was mainly about race preparation with short and long-runs on all three tyre compounds: soft, supersoft and ultrasolft tyres.

Marcus Ericsson

“It’s been a mixed day. It was looking good on the soft and supersoft compounds, but for some reason we were struggling to get the ultrasoft tyres to work. Especially on the low fuel run in FP2, we struggeled to get the grip needed. That’s the challenge for us going forward tomorrow, as there is surely room for improvement on the ultrasoft compound. Nevertheless, I was able to run a fair amount of laps. We will look in more detail into the data, and I am confident that we can find some things to improve.”

Felipe Nasr

“In FP1 we seemed to have quite a good balance on the car with the higher temperatures. However, this is not really relevant, as qualifying and the race will be in the evening, meaning that the temperatures are much lower. Overall, it was important that we went through our programme. Later on in FP2 I was compromised on my quick lap, so I do not have a good reference there. We still have to work on the balance of the car to extract more out it. It is good that we have the evening to analyse all the data in order to make steps forward.”