Ferrari unbeatable on both Friday sessions

The 13th round of the 2018 FIA Formula One World Championship began with two practice session at Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps as teams returned in earnest from the FIA-imposed summer shutdown to prepare for the Belgian Grand Prix on Sunday.

Two 90-minute sessions – FP1 and FP2 – were run under mostly cloudy and relatively cool conditions, with drivers navigating the longest venue in Formula One.

Fastest in FP1 was Scuderia Ferrari driver Sebastian Vettel, whose quick lap of 1:44.358 was .151 of a second better than the next quickest driver, Red Bull Racing’s Max Verstappen.

“Overall, I think it’s going the right way. Today it was a bit difficult to figure out where we are and I think we’ll have to wait for tomorrow to have a better idea," said Vettel.

"The new engine has done what it was supposed to do. Today everything was working well. Now we’ll see about tomorrow: rain shouldn’t give us any more problems and, should we have wet conditions, it would be quite nice to have confirmation that we found the right things to do. On this track everything seems to happen faster, so it should be a lot of fun and if we have dry conditions tomorrow for qualifying, we should be ok.

"There are still some special tracks on the calendar and for sure this one in Spa is very exciting in terms of cornering speeds. We still need to do some work, but we have time to do it”.

FP1 results:

Scuderia Ferrari remained atop FP2, but with Kimi Räikkönen leading the way. His lap of 1:43.355 was .168 of a second better than his nearest pursuer, Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton. The Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps track record of 1:42.553, set last year by Hamilton in the final round of qualifying, remained intact.

“That was our first day of practice after the break; we did our pretty usual job to get a feeling for the car once again," said Räikkönen.

"I enjoy driving on this track, it has a good flow and this generation of cars are pretty nice to drive here. I think Spa is a great circuit, but obviously this doesn’t make you faster or slower!

"We always say that Friday is Friday and times don’t really matter today; it was ok, but for sure we still have some work ahead of us. Tomorrow we’ll try to do our best and see where we end up.  We expected some rain today but it did not come. But the weather can still be a key point this weekend, as it changes very quickly here”.

FP2 results: