Friday: Charles Pic is pleased with the pace of his Caterham

Charles Pic – 19th and 19th

« For me, free practice 1 was okay. I didn’t have as much understeer as Giedo and from the start of the session, we had a reasonable level of grip. In fact, we had too much grip at the rear of the car on our first runs but we improved it throughout the session.

For free practice 2, we made a few more changes to our setup, and started with a better balance than during free practice 1. The degradation on our long runs was good, there is more on the rear than the front, but it’s not significant and is manageable for me. We can draw several positives from today, particularly the gap between us and our closest rivals and our pace on the long runs, which is still comparable to that of the Williams. I think a good weekend awaits us.

Giedo van der Garde – 20th and 20th

« Today’s two sessions were dominated by understeer. During free practice 1, I was running with different settings from Charles’ car to give us a comparison base, and we tried some new braking parts. To be honest, neither the settings nor the new braking hardware really worked, and we spent the majority of free practice 1 trying to deal with the understeer. We also had quite a bit of front locking, something we didn’t have last week at Silverstone, so we made some changes to manage that.

In the afternoon, the balance was a bit better, but we had the same understeer problems, and we saw significant tire degradation and graining on the front left during the long runs. However, during the last long run, the tires worked better, and I felt that we were making good progress. We will work on all of that tonight, and even though I think we will have a lot of work ahead of us, I am quite optimistic that we can have decent qualifying and race here in Hungary.