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FRIDAY TYRE SUMMARY
* Red Bull’s Max Verstappen set the pace during today’s free practice for
the French Grand Prix, followed by the two Mercedes of Valtteri Bottas and
Lewis Hamilton. Bottas was fastest in the morning session, before Verstappen
went even quicker in the afternoon. On both occasions, the P Zero Red soft
tyre in C4 compound was used.
* The teams used mainly the P Zero White hard compound and P Zero Red soft
in the morning, with the P Zero Yellow medium used extensively in the first
part of FP2, followed by the soft compound again as the teams focussed on
qualifying simulations.
* The track was reasonably ‘green’ and slippery in the morning, thanks also
to some fresh asphalt on parts of the surface, but it rubbered in
progressively during the course of the afternoon to provide good grip.
* Weather conditions were dry and warm throughout the day, with FP2 getting
underway in 31 degrees ambient and 49 degrees of asphalt temperature.
Slightly cooler conditions are expected for qualifying, and there’s a chance
of even lower temperatures for the race, with the possibility of rain on
Sunday morning.
* With the soft and medium compounds being run for several laps today, the
gaps between them are roughly as expected: around 0.6 seconds between soft
and medium, and an estimated 0.5 seconds between medium and hard. This means
that both the medium and soft compounds could play an important role in
qualifying tomorrow.
MARIO ISOLA - HEAD OF CAR RACING
“Free practice went more or less as we expected it to. The FP2 time was
slower than the equivalent session in 2019, mainly due to the stronger winds
today, and partly because of some partial track resurfacing. We’ve seen that
the medium and soft compounds are reasonably closely matched, which should
bring them both into play for qualifying tomorrow and have a big effect on
race strategy too. The teams were able to gather plenty of good data over
the soft and medium compounds in particular with different fuel loads, while
the hard was used less extensively and mainly in the morning. So it’s going
to be interesting to see how all that translates into strategy calculation
and different approaches to qualifying tomorrow, which should again be run
in warm and dry conditions here” |
TOP 3 TIMES
FP1
Bottas 1m33.448s SOFT C4 NEW
Hamilton 1m33.783s SOFT C4 NEW
Verstappen 1m33.880s SOFT C4 NEW
FP2
Verstappen 1m32.872s SOFT C4 NEW
Bottas 1m32.880s MEDIUM C3 NEW
Hamilton 1m33.125s SOFT C4 NEW
BEST TIME BY COMPOUND
FP1
HARD C2 Verstappen 1m34.139s
MEDIUM C3 Leclerc 1m35.791s
SOFT C4 Bottas 1m33.448s
FP2
HARD C2 Alonso 1m34.328s
MEDIUM C3 Bottas 1m32.880s
SOFT C4 Verstappen 1m32.872s
MOST LAPS BY COMPOUND SO FAR
COMPOUND DRIVER LAPS
HARD C2 Sainz 22
MEDIUM C3 Schumacher 20
SOFT C4 Mazepin, Norris, Verstappen 15
TYRE STATISTICS OF THE DAY
HARD MEDIUM SOFT
Kms driven* 1355 1606 2383
Sets used overall** 18 19 43
* The above number gives the total amount of kilometres
driven in FP1 and FP2 today, all drivers combined.
** Per compound, all drivers combined.
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