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30 July 2010

Pedro de la Rosa was bullish following practice for the F1 2010 Hungarian Grand Prix on Friday and has predicted that there is 'more to come' from his Ferrari-powered Sauber C29.

de la Rosa was right on it this morning in opening practice and finished the session sixth overall on a 1 minute 22.764 seconds. Although he slipped back in the afternoon, and was only eleventh, on a 1m 21.809s, he was still extremely encouraged.

"For me it was a positive and productive day," said the Spaniard. "My car is pretty good on this low speed circuit, which means all the improvements the team introduced during the recent races are also paying off on this type of track.

"I think we are looking strong here and there is more to come: For the time being my car tends to understeer, the front is a bit lazy, but I’m sure this can be solved by changing the set-up."

Team-mate Kamui Kobayashi however, wasn’t so pleased and he was only 14th in both in FP1 and FP2. His best lap was a 1m 22.212s.

"We have done a lot of set-up work today and my car is getting better, but I am not happy yet," he explained. "The track is quite bumpy and I have to fight understeer as well as oversteer. But my main problem is a lack of grip. I don’t really know yet where this comes from, but the data will tell us and we are now going to look at it."

Sauber technical director, James Key summed-up: "It’s been a very busy day. In the morning we tested some aerodynamic parts on both cars, which provided us with very useful data in view of future developments. The morning was okay for both drivers as the cars ran fine.

"The second session was more of a standard programme, looking at the set-up of the cars and the tyres. The biggest problems today were consistency and traffic. The grip levels were quite tricky and made it difficult to put together a good lap, particularly on the harder tyre, but also with the soft compound it was not easy to produce consistent lap times. That’s definitely something we have to look into this evening.

"We’ve got work to do tonight, and I don’t think it’s straight forward, but Pedro being 11th on a compromised lap wasn’t so bad. For Kamui we need to work on the rear end of his car to make it more stable. I think it’s still open as to what will happen tomorrow."