2017 Japanese Grand Prix - Friday

October 6, 2017 by Mercedes-Benz

Lewis sets fastest time on a rainy Friday afternoon

·Lewis finished the morning session in P2 with Valtteri in P5

·Lewis ended the day in P1 with Valtteri staying in the garage as only five drivers set a time in the wet afternoon session

·Both drivers ran the latest aerodynamic update package

·Lewis and Valtteri both used the Soft and SuperSoft compound tyre in FP1

·Lewis then ran the Wet tyre in FP2

Lewis Hamilton

It's been an interesting day, the car is feeling much better than it was in Malaysia. I'm glad that we had the dry session for FP1. In FP2, there was a lot of rain, but it felt really important to go out and assess the track and see how the car was feeling as the car was not good in the wet in Malaysia. The car feels back to normal, so I'm ready to race. The fans are pretty special here – to be out there in the rain, waiting for us to go out through the whole of FP2. That's also another reason I wanted to go out and at least give them a little bit of a show. So hopefully at least they got to see something as not many cars went out.

Valtteri Bottas

We didn't really run in FP2, so it's a shame for the fans out there who were waiting to see us running. In practice one, the car did feel better than it did in Malaysia, but we still need to work on things to make the car quicker. As a starting point for the weekend, it definitely feels better than a week ago. My run with the Soft tyres was good, but with the SuperSoft, I didn't really gain any grip. So the main thing for me is to understand the SuperSoft performance. The long runs actually weren't too bad, and hopefully we'll see better weather tomorrow.

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James Allison

The weather forecasts for today were actually pretty unpromising from quite a long way out. We weren't expecting much useful running at all in either of the sessions. So it was something of a blessing when we managed to get a largely dry FP1. We focused all our programme around trying to get as much race preparation as we could into that single programme. Although that may be an unusual session, it was actually quite a good one. Both cars getting their laps done, getting a feel for the car on high and low fuel and we were reasonably pleased with the initial balance and performance that the car is showing. Obviously after losing all of FP2 the rest of the weekend is still going to be something of a scramble, but at least we go into tomorrow knowing how we ought to set the car up for both qualifying and race.