Friday proved to be relatively smooth in both practice sessions for McLaren Honda, reliability wise, despite the fact that their star driver, Fernando Alonso, was complaining of a lack of pace throughout most of the first session.
Alonso however, opted to use both sessions to conduct aero evaluations and work on various set-ups and balance configurations for the rest of the weekend.
In FP1, the Spaniard reported issues with the DRS, which led to a couple of brief stoppages. Despite an additional short hiatus for a red flag, as well as set-up changes between runs, he was able to clock up good mileage to prepare him for qualifying and Sunday's race.
The second session began productively, with further evaluations and handling changes. In typical Spa style, the weather turned on its head 20 minutes before the end of FP2, drenching the track quick enough to render it too saturated even for wet compound tyres.
Thus, Fernando had an early mark with the 11th fastest time.
“Spa is probably the best circuit in the world, and every lap you do here is magic. Having said that, we lose so much on the straights, but then we gain in the corners, so it's a difficult weekend for us here,' Fernando said.
“We didn't have a great day today, especially in the first session, where we had some issues. The second session was business as usual and we eventually got to a reasonable car, which we can work on tonight with the engineers and try to find some tenths for tomorrow. When it started raining, we went out in the wet conditions to check how the car would behave in case there's more rain over the weekend. We didn't expect it to rain that much, so I quickly came back into the pits to bring the car home safely.”
“We need a good qualifying, a good start and a good strategy to make everything perfect if we want to take points, and we need to be focussed and concentrated. It's going to be difficult, but maybe the weather will help us – mixed conditions would be ideal.”
