Sauber learning more about their car in Spain

Sauber’s Marcus Ericsson and Felipe Nasr have expressed their happiness after a positive first two practice sessions at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.

Ericsson completed a total of 66 laps over the two sessions, with Nasr also completing 67 laps to prepare their cars for the rest of the weekend.

In the first practice session, Nasr set a lap time of 1m27.253s to finish in 15th place, with Ericsson only a tenth behind with a time of 1m27.392s in 18th. In the second session, Nasr again led the way for the team, completing the session in 20th place with a time of 1m27.812s ahead of Ericsson in 22nd place with a time of 1m28.501s.

“It was a decent day,” said Ericsson. “We started off with a different set-up in FP1, which was not working as we would have hoped it would.

“Therefore, we reverted back to the original one for the second run. In FP2, we mainly focused on race preparation, so I did quite a lot of laps on the medium and hard compounds.

“It was a productive day and we learned a lot. We will see tomorrow how the qualifying pace will be.”

Nasr explained that he could feel a positive direction for the C35 despite not having any major upgrades for the car for this race.

“It was a good Friday,” the Brazilian said. “We were able to work well on the set-up of the car, and I feel we are going in the right direction.

“We only tested the medium and hard tyres. I am satisfied with the behaviour of the car on the medium tyres, even on the long-runs.

“We have to see tomorrow how the car is going to behave on the soft tyres. Now we will analyse all the data collected today and see in which areas we can improve.”