Belgian Grand Prix – Friday Practice

“We don’t know what happened when I got the puncture in P2. We lost the rear right, very suddenly, so we need to have a look – Pirelli is working on finding out why it happened. Other than that, it was a positive day. This morning was tricky with a few rain drops and the track was slippery; it’s a lot colder here than Hungary, but that’s Spa and part of this circuit. This afternoon, we had stable conditions and both of us seemed happy with what we had.”

“It’s always tricky here to get the right set up for the whole lap, so we took the opportunity today to try some different ones. We’ll go through it tonight. We had a pretty good run today but there’s still some performance to find and we need to get the car a bit better balanced in certain conditions. Overall we got good information and it was good to have stable conditions this afternoon.”

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This is undoubtedly one of F1’s great venues, a place where the incredible challenges of the circuit, and the conditions, provide all kinds of drama, from drivers pulling no punches when overtaking on track to drivers almost throwing a few in pitlane, as Mark and David respectively recall…

Mark: “Unless you’ve been to Eau Rouge, you don’t see how steep it is on the run to it. We plummet downhill and then smash into the bottom of the corner. At that moment, I just had the momentum, I pulled to the left and thought, ‘yeah, I can make this work’. You’ll look back at that in years to come and think ‘that’s when you were at your peak, performing well, driving against the best and sometimes beating them’.“

David: “After we collided in the rain, we drove back to the pits, Michael on three wheels and me with no rear wing and pulled into our respective garages. I got out of the car and Michael was already running down the pitlane. He came into the garage, I could see he was angry and was shouting ‘were you trying to f***ing kill me?’. There were two mechanics between me and him and I shouted back ‘you ran into the back of me’. The only trouble was I was still wearing my helmet, so he couldn’t hear me! As the two mechanics were there he couldn’t really get close, but I kept my helmet on just in case he fancied throwing a punch. If he had got close though, keeping the helmet on meant I could have given him a little Glasgow Kiss.”

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