Caterham F1 Team
Alexander Rossi expressed his delight after participating in the opening practice session for the United States Grand Prix.
Despite running being curtailed firstly due to fog and latter courtesy of technical problems with the medical helicopter, Rossi was 19th fastest of the 22 runners, managing 21 laps of the Circuit of the Americas.
"I'm very pleased with how my FP1 session went, both for me and for the team," he said.
"It was a proud moment when I drove out on track as the first American driver to take part in an official F1 race weekend session at COTA, something that will live with me for ever and an accolade I want to thank the team for, and everyone's who's backed me to help make happen here in Austin."
"It's obviously a bit of a shame the session was cut short by the issues with the helicopter, but the team worked really hard to make sure we could still run a decent number of laps, and by the end of the session we were only a few laps short of what we'd planned.
"In the car the balance was pretty good right from the start of the session."
"With the cold track temperatures we knew we'd have issues with tyre warm-up and that was definitely the case on the first two runs, but on run three it had improved a bit, both because the temperatures had gone up and with a couple of setup changes we'd made."
"I was mostly dealing with understeer throughout the session but I'm sure, with more time, it's something we'd have been able to sort out and I think my final laptime showed pretty clearly that it wasn't holding me back.
