Ladies and Gentlemen,

It wasn’t the typical Friday today, and not only by having Ferrari on top of the timesheets, it was a day packed with technical problems for the all teams struggling to find the balance on the Pirelli tyres. As VET put it: “(Shanghai) is quite brutal on tyres, I was sliding a lot and there was a lot of degradation” Even RAI, the fastest man today say “it was a quite a difficult day overall, I was struggling to get grip on the tyres due to the wind...I was sliding a lot and this feeling was not very nice”.

Pirelli has brought the same combo as the two previous races: med/soft/super-soft (white/yellow/red) but has imposed a much higher than normal inflation pressures making set-up work a nightmare for everyone. The fronts are running 26psi when normally teams prefer 20-21psi. GRO’s Haas was the most affected, “You don’t have any feeling, it’s like a piece of wood, it’s just not drivable...it doesn’t feel like a racing car…” RIC was surprised to find his name in the top 5 in both sessions, his Red Bull “is a handful to drive. We saw a quite a few guys spin this morning, I think the wind was having a big effect also”. He was probably talking about HAM, who spun twice at Turn 11 fighting with oversteer.

FP1 was interrupted by 2 red flags, first it was MAS when the left rear tyre came off the rim sending him spinning off. Shortly after he suffered a repeat failure, and then MAG had a broken rear suspension in his Renault. Pirelli launched and investigation and it was found these issues not tyre related.

FP1 - ROS (1.38.037) HAM VET RIC RAI KVY SAI BUT HUL VER

FP2-  RAI (91.36.896) VET ROS HAM RIC VER HUL SAI PER BOT

ALO has been cleared to compete, he says he is still in pain but is convinced he can managed it during the remainder of the weekend. “I want to avoid any silly movements which can break the rib again (when getting in & out of the car)...the circuit has a lot of right-hand corners, which is not a good combination…”

The fastest laps of the day were set early on the second session when the top teams bolted the super-softs, attention then turned to long runs in preparation for Sunday’s race. With only a handful of laps completed in FP1 teams had to complete their programs splitting the work between drivers. Take note: Ferrari concentrated their efforts running long stints in super-softs, Mercedes had ROS working on the softs and HAM on the mediums. To better forecast Sunday’s race I recommend you take a look at Pirelli’s driver tyre selection chart - as published by Santiago in our website: (he will be posting this chart for every GP from now on. Thanks Santi!)

http://www.pirelli.com/corporate/en/press/2016/04/05/chinese-grand-prix-april-15-17-2016-selected-sets-per-driver/

Time to work. Who’s going to find the best set up , the silver or the red cars? They are as close as they had been in a very long time. Let’s see.

Cato -HAM ROS VET

Cheers!