Sakon Yamamoto is pleased with the progress he has made in the last few weeks. The Japanese driver made his debut with the Spyker F1 team at the Hungarian Grand Prix three weeks ago, however his performance was less than impressive.
Although he finished bottom of the free practice today, he finished less than a tenth of a second behind team-mate Adrian Sutil, a good improvement over his Hungarian performance.
“Today I am very happy as I got used to the different type of tyre and got more familiar with the car,†Yamamoto remarked. “We also did some long runs with a heavy fuel load which hopefully is good for the race as I could get a feeling of how the heavier car behaved. We finished our whole programme and I am very satisfied but we will keep working for tomorrow.â€
Yamamoto s team-mate Sutil also had a productive day, despite difficult conditions at the start thanks to a dusty track. “Today was a fairly standard Friday practice for us,†Sutil explained.
“At first the track was very dirty so we tried to do some longer runs and wait for conditions to improve. Over these runs we checked temperatures and then did some set-up work. The car balance was not quite right as we had a lot of understeer and the tyres are very hard and difficult to use, but we will check the data tonight and do all the normal things to set it up for tomorrow. We should be alright as normally we manage to get a good set-up for the race and I think we should be able to do it here too.â€
