Friday free practice tyre analysis 2021 French GP
Red Bull’s Max Verstappen set the pace during today’s free practice for the French Grand Prix, followed by the two Mercedes of Valtteri Bottas and Lewis Hamilton. Bottas was fastest in the morning session, before Verstappen went even quicker in the afternoon. On both occasions, the P Zero Red soft tyre in C4 compound was used.
The teams used mainly the P Zero White hard compound and P Zero Red soft in the morning, with the P Zero Yellow medium used extensively in the first part of FP2, followed by the soft compound again as the teams focused on qualifying simulations.
The track was reasonably ‘green’ and slippery in the morning, thanks also to some fresh asphalt on parts of the surface, but it rubbered in progressively during the course of the afternoon to provide good grip.
Weather conditions were dry and warm throughout the day, with FP2 getting underway in 31 degrees ambient and 49 degrees of asphalt temperature. Slightly cooler conditions are expected for qualifying, and there’s a chance of even lower temperatures for the race, with the possibility of rain on Sunday morning.
With the soft and medium compounds being run for several laps today, the gaps between them are roughly as expected: around 0.6 seconds between soft and medium, and an estimated 0.5 seconds between medium and hard. This means that both the medium and soft compounds could play an important role in qualifying tomorrow.
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So good to have the informative calm commentary this weekend of Martin Brundle in a language we can understand. De Resta is OK for short grabs from race control or wherever but his race call with Crofty is awful. Too garbled .Spoils the viewing for me. As much as I like the F1 I’ve decided to only watch the Croft/ Brundle coverages in future.
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