Red Bull: We’re not chasing lap times

“Today was about doing a lot of laps… a lot of laps!” said Max at the end of the day. “The focus for us today was on long runs and the feeling with the car was good. No problems with the car and I was happy with the pace. We can definitely work from here. If it’s going to be good enough, we’ll have to wait and see. We’ll find out when we get into the races, but I think we can be happy with what we have. I’m ready for it.”

Head of Race Engineering Guillaume Rocquelin added: “Well, last night we were hoping for a repeat of the good running we had with Daniel yesterday and we got it. As with yesterday, we drew up a pretty ambitious run plan, but we managed to get through the whole programme. Of course, there are lots of teams getting some good mileage on their cars as well, so we’re not patting ourselves on the back, but the kind of reliability we’ve had these past two days hasn’t always been our strong suit in pre-season in recent times. The reliability gives us plenty to work with ahead of the first race. In terms of what we got through today, it was very similar to what we did with Daniel yesterday – some tyre work this morning, race simulation in the afternoon and no problems. Max didn’t do any performance running on the softest tyres, simply because we’re not chasing lap times, it’s not suited to this circuit, and we got the data we needed on that tyre from Daniel’s runs yesterday.”