Mercedes pleased with Friday practice in Malaysia: Formula 1 Update
Mercedes drivers, Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg, have expressed their satisfaction after the Friday practice sessions, at Sepang in Malaysia. Both have claimed that the team was far better compared to what was witnessed during the first race
of the 2011 Formula 1 season in Australia.
Schumacher said, “We definitely made a step, more to what we had in Barcelona [testing]. There's a bit more to come for tomorrow so we are reasonably happy. We are not completely there, but we are getting there.”
On the other hand Rosberg said, “It's a step forward and when you take everything into consideration, we are definitely closer to where we need to be. But it must be said that we haven't solved everything yet, we still have a few issues which need
to be solved and we'll see how soon we can get it done.”
Mercedes had a lot of mixed performances during the winter testing and the team was not expected to be amongst the front-runners. However, the German giants brought some upgrades during their final pre-season testing at Barcelona, which lifted the
car’s performance to a greater extent.
The team struggled quite a bit to match the pace of their rivals and it seemed that the current season would be a repeat of last year.
Rosberg managed to qualify for in the top ten, but his team-mate was unable to reach the third leg of qualifying in Australia. Adding insult to injury, both drivers were unable to complete the race and had to retire, following their crash.
Mercedes could not have got off to a worse start to their 2011 campaign than what they did at Melbourne. The team was confident of bouncing back strongly in the second race of the season.
One more team which was confident of a positive show in Malaysia was Ferrari. The Italian team was not even close to their rivals, Red Bull and McLaren, in terms of speed. However, the scarlet car repeated its disappointing performance in today’s free
practice as well and they were even out-paced by Mercedes.
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