At Mercedes, they are still looking for the right balance

 

Both Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton admitted that in today's free practice they had a lot of trouble finding the right balance on the car, so the Mercedes racers hope that the engineers will be able to find solutions overnight. Rosberg finished in eighth place today, and in the 90-minute training session, the biggest challenge for him was to find a compromise between the speed of the car and the tire-friendly settings.

“Today we managed to do everything we set out to do for the first two workouts,” Rosberg said. “But it’s clear we weren’t as good as in previous free practice. The car was heavily understeer, and we saw that the rear tires would be heavily loaded during the race.

The problem with finding balance on a race car is that if you want to wear the rear tires as little as possible, you have to adjust the race car so that it is heavily understered, which makes you waste time. We still have a lot of work to do overnight, as we have to find the right balance for tomorrow and for the race. ”

Rosberg's team rival, Lewis Hamilton, was slightly worse than the German. The Briton, however, says that it is necessary to ask whether Mercedes has taken the right path with the settings. “Today we worked harder than ever, but we did not manage to set up the car the way we would like. I had some problems in the first workout, which we managed to fix as part of the second workout, but we still need to figure out where we’re wasting time and find more speed.

We changed the settings of the car in the direction we thought would fit this track, but we need to look at this and make sure the route we took was the right one. The heat has a bad effect on the tires, so it’s good that we were able to drive so many long strings where we gathered important data. We are not as far from the top as today's times show, but we have a lot of work ahead of us and we have a difficult battle ahead of us, ”said the champion from the 2008 season.