The first free practice sessions of the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix are over.
In FP1, the Red Bulls left the best sensations, as Fernando Alonso was the only one who could stand up to them, being in the middle of the Austrian-team drivers.
At the beginning, Sergio Perez had some difficulties with the car due to the car set-up, however, he asked for help from the Milton Keynes team members to fix it and this, together with a set of soft tyres, helped the Mexican to get the third place .209 thousandths behind Max Verstappen, who achieved a time of 1:29.659.
Afterwards, FP2 was held at the Jeddah circuit, a session in which both drivers improved their times from the first practice, the two-time champion by 0.501s thousandths and the Mexican by 0.568s.
Despite the improvement of the Red Bull drivers, only Verstappen managed to place in the top 3 of the second free practice, behind Fernando Alonso and George Russell.
Perez was pleased with the RB20’s performance despite having placed fifth in FP2, and said he believes it was a positive day and that his car just needs some fine-tuning: “I think we are in a good place with the car and performance, it was a very positive Friday. We just need to do some fine tuning but I am happy with the window we have the car in, we understand what we need for tomorrow.”
The Mexican also commented that they have a very good idea of how to make the car faster, which will be of great benefit both in qualifying and in the long run: “We have a very good idea what direction we are going to take to make the car faster and if we can do that, it is going to Benefit the long run and the qualifying. I am very pleased with today.”
For his part, the World Champion said that overall the sessions had gone well and felt that, despite being a street circuit, Jeddah Corniche is very well prepared: “The practice sessions today have been pretty good overall. The pace has been good on both the long and short runs and they have prepared the track well for a street circuit.”
The Dutchman is also generally very realistic and accepted that there are other teams who had better single lap performance, so he commented that they need to review the information they have but said it had been a very productive day: “Overall we learnt a lot and there are always things you look to do better on a one lap performance. We know some other teams have a bit more power on the one lap so we’ll look to try and improve our overall performance and extract as much as we can from this. Looking to qualifying I’m feeling good; it will be tight but we are happy with our performance today an looking forward to tomorrow.”
