Friday: Still a lot of work at Caterham

Charles Pic – 19th and 20th

The first session went well. The car’s balance was good from the installation lap, and the rest of the session went as planned. We mainly worked on different mechanical setup options and made adjustments to the aerodynamic downforce. The lap times weren’t very important, but it’s always good to see that the gap to the teams ahead is as expected.

During the second session, we started with an eight-lap stint on hard tires, but I felt the changes we made at lunch had a negative impact on the car’s balance, particularly increasing my understeer and stability on corner entry. We made some mechanical adjustments and went out on mediums for the first time. However, the car behaved differently than this morning. The balance wasn’t as good, and there was a lot of understeer. We clearly did not achieve the time we expected with that set. On the long stints, the car’s balance was again inconsistent. We had understeer and oversteer, which is obviously not what we want here. However, we managed to complete a good number of laps and have a lot of data to work on tonight. We will continue to work and come back stronger tomorrow.

Giedo van der Garde – 21st [Free practice 2]

« I got back into the car for the second session. I immediately started working on the hard tires. During the first stint, my times were satisfactory but the traction wasn’t great, and I needed a little more time to find the best line in the first sector. In the second stint, we made some progress. We then tried the first set of medium tires, which was honestly strange. The grip you expect with a new set of tires just wasn’t there. The car’s balance was good, but we couldn’t find the time we should have with the mediums. So we’ll look into that in detail tonight. On the long runs, the pace was good, as was the level of degradation. But we definitely need to look at how we heat the tires to ensure we have a way to solve the lack of grip with the mediums, especially during qualifying. »

Heikki Kovalainen – 21st [Free Practice 1]

« In general, I am happy with the way the session went. The most important thing for me is obviously to help the team as much as I can, and it is always tough to do so during such a short session, especially since it takes at least one lap to get used to the speed again with the low downforce aerodynamic package we are running today. There was a bit of understeer in the high-speed sections, but the main issue was stability under braking. This is obviously important at Monza where there are several heavy braking zones, but we made progress on this by the end of the session. »