It’s nice to be back racing at Hockenheim. I’ve got fantastic memories of the last race here and I like the track a lot. Today, we concentrated on set-up to try and adapt to the temperatures, which are going to be extremely high all weekend. I had no problems with either the Soft or Supersoft compounds and we just need to understand how they will behave in the race and what the weather could be like on Sunday. I don’t think going away with FRIC changed much in terms of driving style and in order to have a clear picture you’d have to do a comparison with and without it, but running without it, we just have to adapt and be as well prepared as possible with what we have.

Like every Friday, our programme covered set-up work in the first session, then evaluating the tyres and doing a race simulation in the afternoon. Unfortunately in the morning, because of a technical problem, I had to come back to the garage and was unable to do an additional run on the Soft tyres, but thanks to a great job from the team, I managed to quickly get back out on track. In the afternoon, we made up for lost time and managed to improve on all fronts. Overall, it’s been a reasonably positive day, but it’s still to early to make any predictions. We will have to wait until tomorrow to know more.

This was a very busy day of testing, affected by the particularly high temperatures and the new element of FRIC being banned. The absence of this system did not change our programmes, only requiring a bit of time for our drivers to adapt. Fernando had a trouble free morning, while on Kimi’s car there was a problem with the water pump, which cost him a run. However, the team sorted the problem quickly, so that Kimi was back on track in a short space of time. In the afternoon, we continued to work on set-up, also trying the Supersofts. As emerged on the long runs also, if the air and track temperatures stay this high, managing the tyre degradation, on the two softest compounds in the range, will become of even greater importance for the race.