Force India: We can run the Mercedes quick race mode longer

Speaking after the first day of free practice at the city circuit, Chief Operating Officer Otmar Szafnauer told reporters, “Mercedes sometimes, rightfully so, will restrict the more potent modes that we run to a limited amount of time or laps. That’s because of the way they go about developing.”

“They will validate from a reliability standpoint those modes to a point where they think that they’re safe to run – and then they let us all run those.”

“Then they’ll go back during the season and have an increase on those modes, so you can run a higher mode for longer, and then they will stick that on the dyno and validate to make sure the engine will hold.”

“When they are happy, then they increase the modes. And they’ve done that here. [It’s worth] a tenth [of a second] maybe. Half a tenth in qualifying.”

“It’s a bit of a longer qualifying mode. During the race, we run two modes. The race-plus mode as we call it. Everyone calls it something different. The quicker race mode, we can run it longer now.”

“They increased it by a significant amount of kilometres. Maybe 20-30km longer. It’s lap time at the end of the day.”

The Silverstone based team performed well on the opening day in Baku, with Perez and Ocon third and fifth fastest in FP1 and in FP2 the Frenchman was 7th and Perez 12th.

Szafnauer revealed, "The car seemed to be a bit better. The drivers are a little bit happier. Top 10 should be achievable now."

"The first session was basically an aero testing session with both cars trying some development parts. All the data we collected will help us learn more about the car’s behaviour and where we can find more performance going forward."

“You always bring updates that the tunnel and CFD have given you an indication are going to be better than what you have now and by a significant amount.”

“But that’s not reality. This is reality. You have to bolt them to the car and see if it correlates. Our correlation has been really good,” added Szafnauer.