Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa finished Friday in second and third places as Ferrari got its Montreal weekend off to a flying start.
Alonso was only 0.054s off the pace setting McLaren of Lewis Hamilton, and technical director Pat Fry agreed that it had been an encouraging first day for the Maranello team.
“We had a lot of work to get through today and we were worried the rain might come, which could certainly have made life complicated,” said Fry.
“Fortunately, the expected storm hit immediately after the end of the second practice session, so that we were able to get through everything we had set ourselves to do.”
Ferrari’s main job today was to evaluate two different exhaust specifications.
“We brought two different exhaust configurations here – one was the one used in the last two races, the other represents our latest interpretation of the concept that was part of the car when it made its debut in Jerez. From what we could see today, the latter configuration seems to be positive in terms of performance even if, obviously, we need to analyse the data very carefully to make the right choices for the race.
“This track requires a rather different downforce level to those we have visited so far, so we also worked a lot on this front and, in this case also, we need to study the data we have acquired before making a judgement one way or the other.”
Fry said the team doesn’t yet have much information about the supersoft.
“We did not manage to do that many laps and, also linked to this aspect is the unknown factor relating to temperature. In fact, the weather forecast for Sunday suggests an increase in track temperature of around ten degrees, which could completely change the situation compared to what we have seen today. Therefore there is a lot of work to do over the rest of the weekend, but at least we have got off on the right foot.”
Adam Cooper F1 