Handling puzzles Raikkonen as McLaren make gains

Kimi Raikkonen led the Ferrari charge against Mercedes in the last race but he ended the first day of practice for the Spanish Grand Prix distinctly unhappy with the balance of his SF-15T.

As forecast the conditions on Friday were very warm – with track temperatures nudging 50C – but also quite windy, either of which Raikkonen suspects might have contributed to his problems.

“I don’t know if it was caused by the wind or by the conditions of the track but I have been struggling all day,” he said. “We did not see anything bad with the upgrades we brought here. It’s just the feeling that it’s not completely right, as if the car was sliding. I feel there’s a lot to improve”

Several unhappy radio messages between him and race engineer David Greenwood were heard during practice. “I have no grip whatsoever, front or rear,” Raikkonen complained during the second session. “It’s very poor the car now and I cannot understand that. How it can be so difficult?”

Raikkonen was running on the hard tyre at the time and Greenwood was keen to move on to the softer medium compound – “the tyre we’re going to use more this weekend”, he said. Team mate Sebastian Vettel also feels the medium is the quicker compound.

However in the hot conditions of second practice Mercedes preferred the hard tyre. “The second session was quite a strange one with some unusual gaps between the teams,” said executive director Toto Wolff, “and we found the car was better on the [hard] tyre than the [medium] in the hot conditions.”

The race, however, is expected to be run in slightly cooler conditions. Will Mercedes therefore join Ferrari in preferring the softer compound? And, as we saw in Malaysia, will they be tempted to alter their qualifying tactics to ensure they have sufficient new sets of their preferred rubber to hand?

Even in the age of DRS and designed-to-degrade tyres, pole position remains very important at the Circuit de Catalunya. Nico Rosberg knows if he’s going to have a chance of putting one over his team mate in qualifying he needs to come up with some answers overnight. “On one lap I still have a bit of work to do to find some more speed,” he admitted.

One of the stand-out performances during practice came from Jenson Button, who set the eighth-fastest time in his McLaren. The team aren’t getting too excited about their progress yet, however.

“I wouldn’t read too much into a Friday,” said McLaren’s acting CEO Jonathan Neale. “We all like to convince ourselves that if you’re quick on a Friday you’ll be quicker during a weekend but Fridays are notoriously fickle, you don’t know what everybody else is doing so we’ll see tomorrow just where we’ve got to.”

“But the reality is we’ve been pushing on all areas ofthe car. We have aerodynamic upgrades this weekend, we have some engine reliability upgrades, there’s a huge amount of work still to do on our systems package, much of our performance we’re getting from systems integration work. And importantly ExxonMobil have delivered us a fuel upgrade here as well.”

Longest stint comparison – second practice

This chart shows all the drivers’ lap times (in seconds) during their longest unbroken stint:

Complete practice times

Pos	Driver	Car	FP1	FP2			Total laps
1	Nico Rosberg	Mercedes	1’26.828	1’27.616			63
2	Lewis Hamilton	Mercedes	1’26.898	1’26.852			53
3	Sebastian Vettel	Ferrari	1’27.806	1’27.260			58
4	Kimi Raikkonen	Ferrari	1’27.832	1’27.780			52
5	Daniil Kvyat	Red Bull-Renault	1’28.785	1’27.943			32
6	Max Verstappen	Toro Rosso-Renault	1’28.529	1’28.017			55
7	Carlos Sainz Jnr	Toro Rosso-Renault	1’28.132	1’28.674			58
8	Jenson Button	McLaren-Honda	1’29.817	1’28.494			53
9	Valtteri Bottas	Williams-Mercedes		1’28.525			39
10	Felipe Massa	Williams-Mercedes	1’28.831	1’28.712			57
11	Fernando Alonso	McLaren-Honda	1’29.813	1’28.723			50
12	Daniel Ricciardo	Red Bull-Renault	1’29.075	1’29.098			13
13	Romain Grosjean	Lotus-Mercedes		1’29.086			14
14	Felipe Nasr	Sauber-Ferrari	1’29.140	1’29.333			51
15	Pastor Maldonado	Lotus-Mercedes	1’30.110	1’29.217			41
16	Marcus Ericsson	Sauber-Ferrari		1’29.361			34
17	Nico Hulkenberg	Force India-Mercedes	1’29.409	1’29.601			58
18	Raffaele Marciello	Sauber-Ferrari	1’29.630				15
19	Jolyon Palmer	Lotus-Mercedes	1’29.676				21
20	Sergio Perez	Force India-Mercedes	1’30.096	1’29.707			54
21	Susie Wolff	Williams-Mercedes	1’29.708				22
22	Will Stevens	Manor-Ferrari	1’32.471	1’31.929			52
23	Roberto Merhi	Manor-Ferrari	1’32.647	1’32.751			43

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