Red Bull

Sebastian Vettel, P1 - 1:40.088, 5th; P2 - 1:38.832, 1st
“We had a pretty good program for today and I think both of us managed to get the most out of it. We’ll have a look where we can improve tonight in different areas; it’s always a compromise on a track like this with a bit of top speed in the first sector, then the last sector is pretty twisty in terms of rhythm - it’s a bit like Budapest, so you need a bit of downforce there. So far so good, we have good information and the guys will now get on with the job tonight.”

Mark Webber, P1 - 1:39.575, 3rd; P2 - 1:38.864, 2nd
“All in all we can be quite happy, but I think it looks extremely tight. I’m not happy with every run we had today, but I think the track was changing quite a lot this morning, it was better than we expected. This afternoon it was quite slippery to start with, but then I think it got a little bit better so, all in all the car felt alright and now we see what we can do for tomorrow. I think we have to improve ourselves to match the others.”

Lotus

Kimi Raikkonen, P1 - 1:40.929, 11th; P2 - 1:39.839, 10th
“The circuit is okay; it’s surprisingly bumpy in some parts but it’s quite different from other places we race. It’s difficult for me to say about the exhaust until I’ve sat down with the engineers and gone through the data. We’ll try to improve the car for tomorrow as it wasn’t very easy to drive and get a good lap today. Let’s see if we can get it completely right and maybe we can be in the top five in qualifying.”

Romain Grosjean, P1 - 1:40.422, 8th; P2 - 1:39.957, 11th
“It’s not been the easiest day. I think we still have some work to do with the car to get the best out of the tyres so tomorrow morning will be important. The track is interesting but it’s not been so hard to learn. The trickiest part is definitely Turns 11 and 12 which are not easy to get exactly right but overall it’s not too bad. On the positive side we’ve had a good amount of time learning the circuit and gathered a lot of data, so hopefully we can analyse things overnight and see an improved performance by the time we get to qualifying.”

Alan Permane, Lotus trackside operations director
“We ran the Coanda exhaust system on Kimi’s car for both sessions. Romain ran with the Singapore generation rear wing for evaluation at the start of FP1, swapping to the Japan spec rear wing for the remainder of the day. Pirelli’s soft compound tyre was used in the morning, the soft and super soft in the afternoon. The Coanda exhaust performed as expected aerodynamically. Heavy fuel balance and tyre degradation levels were both promising.”

James Allison, Lotus technical director
“We’re happy with how the new exhaust worked from a performance perspective and now need to assess if there are any potential reliability implications due to the hot exhaust gas running in different areas than usual. Early impressions are certainly good and we expect to retain it for the rest of the weekend with Kimi. Both drivers learnt the circuit very quickly. Romain complained of a little too much oversteer and with Kimi there’s still potential with the setup, especially as we learn more about the new exhaust. Both drivers reported that they were very happy with the balance of the car when on high fuel loads and degradation levels look manageable from the tyres so it’s been a productive first day.”