22 April: San Marino Grand Prix - Friday Practice Report - McLaren Mercedes
West McLaren Mercedes drivers Pedro de la Rosa, Kimi Raikkonen and Alex Wurz finished with the first, third and eighth fastest
times respectively in today's second practice session at Imola. Kimi completed a total of 21 laps, his fastest time being 1:21.704.
Alex completed a total of 22 laps, with 1:22.174, and Pedro 48 laps, with 1:20.484.
Kimi Raikkonen "Today has
gone well, we completed our programme and I am happy with the set up of the car. Unfortunately I suffered from traffic today and was
not able to get the best possible lap time, but everything looks good for the rest of the weekend. I am looking forward to see how
we compare in qualifying tomorrow."
Alex Wurz "I am basically satisfied with my practice today. We carried
out good tyre evaluation, which is not so easy on this circuit. The set up should be OK. On my fast lap with new Michelin tyres I
made minor mistakes otherwise I would have been quicker. However that doesn't worry me as I think that we are set for tomorrow and
Sunday when I expect close times during the qualifying sessions."
Pedro de la Rosa "It has been a good
day, we completed our entire programme and I think that we can still extract more from the car. We completed a large number of laps
to collect as much data as possible; this should be a good baseline for our race preparation."
Ron Dennis "It
has been a satisfactory day with the team working well despite a minor technical difficulty this morning on Alex's car. There has
been solid work on all cars evaluating our Michelin tyre choice for the weekend and working on set up. The whole weekend is clearly
going to be competitive and we need to continue this work in order to achieve our objectives at this event."
Norbert
Haug "A promising start to the weekend with a productive free practice when we evaluated our Michelin tyre choice in
preparation for the race and have achieved good results. Pedro also carried out useful simulation runs for the race. However the
meaning of today's results needs not necessarily be conclusive for Sunday."
