Andrew Shovlin: “Our number one concern is getting the soft tyre to work on the first lap; our headline times were good today but it took us a lot of laps to get there and qualifying is so important at this track.”
Shovlin acknowledged the practice sessions had otherwise been “fairly smooth” for Mercedes, although he stressed that traffic meant the team could not gather as much data as it would have liked.
“We are working to close the gap [to Mercedes], so we don’t know yet what we need to do,” Charles Leclerc said.