2013 Indian Grand Prix, Friday

Romain Grosjean ended the first day of practice for the Indian Grand Prix with the third fastest lap of the day, whilst Kimi Räikkönen was eighth at the Buddh International Circuit. Both drivers completed their Friday programmes, with extra focus given to long runs on Pirelli’s soft and medium tyre allocation.

Technical programme notes

• Both cars ran trouble-free through both sessions enabling a variety of set-up permutations to be evaluated.
  
• Pirelli’s medium (white) tyre was used in the morning and the medium and soft (yellow) compound slick tyres were used in the afternoon session.
  

What we learned today:

• The E21 demonstrated strong potential using both tyre compounds.
  

Kimi Räikkönen, E21-05

Free practice 1: P17, 1:28.730, 18 laps

Free practice 2: P8, 1:26.632, 32 laps

Kimi: “The car feels pretty okay now, but we can still make it better. We made quite a few changes in the morning as it didn’t feel so good then, but it’s much better now and we should be able to make more progress for tomorrow. The track is quite slippery, but that improves with time and the car gets better too.”

Romain Grosjean, E21-04

Free practice 1: P4, 1:26.990, 20 laps

Free practice 2: P3, 1:26.220, 36 laps

Romain: “That was a good start to the weekend. The car feels good and we made progress through the day to make it better. It’s still a struggle to find grip here which can make things interesting as you find the limits, but the pace of our car relative to our rivals looks quite good. I’m hopeful of another solid day tomorrow which should give us another strong qualifying position if the evidence of today is anything to go by. We’ll do everything we can to take the fight to Red Bull.”

Alan Permane, Trackside Operations Director:

“It was a difficult morning for Kimi who wasn’t happy with the balance of his car so his engineers made a reasonable amount of changes to the set-up over lunch, meaning the car was much more to his liking in the afternoon. Romain was generally happy with his car and just made minor changes to the set-up to get it 100% to his liking. We completed a good number of laps on low and high fuel with both tyres and we’re looking in strong shape. The Red Bulls are unfortunately looking incredibly quick, but we’re leading the charge behind them.”