Thursday: Massa regains form at Ferrari
If Fernando Alonso set the fastest time during Free Practice 1, the Spaniard was outpaced by Felipe Massa in the second session. The Ferrari drivers are therefore pleased with their day, which they cautiously consider encouraging for the rest of the weekend.
Fernando Alonso – 1st and 4th:
« For us drivers, Thursday in Monaco provides the best opportunity to get reacquainted with a truly unique circuit. The more you drive there, the more confidence you gain and the more you can push to lower lap times.
This morning, we were able to complete the scheduled program without any issues, but in the afternoon, the rain came and ruined our plans and those of others as well. We couldn’t even try out the Super Soft tires, and only Button found the right moment to make the most of these tires, which explains how he recorded the fastest time.
Now, we need to look at what the weather will be like on Saturday morning: if it’s going to be dry, then maybe we’ll do more laps than usual, but if it rains, we’ll have to focus on the race. In fact, it’s not like we learned much more from the intermediates, given that the track was only wet in certain areas, so it wasn’t very representative. We can’t control the weather; we can only adapt when it changes.
Regarding the car, I would say the first impressions are more positive: everything seemed to respond as expected. We only made a few adjustments to the settings, trying to improve them, but it’s obviously too early to draw any conclusions. Let’s say the weekend started well; now we need to try to continue on this path.
Felipe Massa – 6th and 3rd:
« We couldn’t drive as much as we would have liked due to the light showers that fell this afternoon, but I’m still happy with how things went this Thursday. The car felt OK to me right from the start of the session, with good balance in all conditions and better traction than we expected. Even when we were driving on intermediates in the final part of free practice 2, the feeling was still positive.
Regarding the tires, we have not used the Super Softs, so we cannot comment on their behavior, whereas the Softs performed well, including in terms of degradation.
Of course, there is always a lot of work to be done to perfect the details and fine-tune the settings, but we have an additional day to think about the improvements we can make in this area.
It’s difficult to make predictions about the qualifications and even more so for the race, but we can definitely consider this first day as positive.
