Nico Rosberg: “We were expecting to be strong at this track…”

Nico Rosberg was satisfied with his first day of work in Montreal, despite losing out to Mercedes team mate Lewis Hamilton on overall times.

Rosberg was 0.175s down on Hamilton at the end of FP2 at a circuit where the Briton has won three times.

“I’m very satisfied, it was a great day really today,” he said. “The track was great, consistent conditions, I felt happy with the car. Of course there’s still work to do, but I generally felt comfortable in the car. It was a really good day, and also for me it was a pleasure to drive the car.

“Some good long runs, we have some good pace here, so it’s looking very promising. We were expecting to be strong at this track, and it seems to look like that at the moment. So it’s all going the right way.”

Rosberg said that keeping the supersoft tyre alive will be important, although it remains to be seen to what extent.

“Strategy will be important, definitely. There was quite a lot of tyre degradation. But then again I think there’s not that much flexibility with the strategy, so even if you do make your tyres last longer I’m not sure you can really make a big difference there. We’ll wait and see now. Now they’re going to measure the tyres and see how much rubber is still on them. They have five different points where they measure, and each point they have a look, and then they judge how many laps I could have done in theory.”

Meanwhile Rosberg has not been entirely comfortable with his brakes this year, but at a track where they play such a big role, he was a little happier.

“It’s going to take a lot of time to get on top of that, because it takes a long time to make changes and produce new brakes, like four months or something. But in general today it was a positive day on that front. I’m not sure why, but I felt more comfortable with them, which was nice. We tried something different with them this morning, but that didn’t work. This afternoon was a lot better.”