Nico Hulkenberg and Michael Schumacher booked their places in the top ten in Friday's practice for the Hungarian GP...
Williams:
Nico Hulkenberg: "It was a positive day for us, we worked efficiently through our programme and got plenty of work done. It looks similar to Hockenheim here in terms of our relative pace and hopefully if everything goes well, we will be inside the top ten tomorrow."
Rubens Barrichello: "My day went well and we managed to finish plenty of comparative tests which are important for the weekend. We can see already that it is going to be a very close grid and it will require our best efforts to qualify at the head of the group of cars we are running among. All of this makes it a very busy weekend in terms of the effort we need to make."
Mercedes GP:
Michael Schumacher: "Today we saw two sessions where neither the long runs nor the single laps were looking particularly good. We are not up to the speed that we normally are on Fridays and unfortunately our car does not look very good here at the moment. We have to look deeply into the data now to see if there are any specific reasons or if it is due to the character of the circuit. I think our specification is better than we had at Silverstone but we have to make it suit this track. We obviously hope for a better performance tomorrow and Sunday."
Nico Rosberg: "It was an interesting day and even though we have taken a small step back with our upgrades, the car seems to work as it should. The track was unexpectedly fast so we had to do some different things with the set-up just to get a feel for it. My lap time wasn't particularly representative as I didn't set a time because of the traffic so I think we look to be in our general position behind the frontrunners at the moment."
Sauber:
Pedro de la Rosa: "For me it was a positive and productive day. My car is pretty good on this low speed circuit, which means all the improvements the team introduced during the recent races are also paying off on this type of track. I think we are looking strong here and there is more to come: For the time being my car tends to understeer, the front is a bit lazy, but I'm sure this can be solved by changing the set-up."
Kamui Kobayashi: "We have done a lot of set-up work today and my car is getting better, but I am not happy yet. The track is quite bumpy and I have to fight understeer as well as oversteer. But my main problem is a lack of grip. I don't really know yet where this comes from, but the data will tell us and we are now going to look at it."
Toro Rosso:
Jaime Alguersuari: "It was a useful day, as we tested many elements and got a lot of information to analyse. Because we were evaluating some new components today, I expect us to make more progress tomorrow morning in terms of improving the set-up and balance of the car. I did a good long run, which is useful in terms of Sunday's race. As far as our pace is concerned, at this stage I would say the upgrades we have are an improvement and I hope that translates into a better qualifying performance than usual. Traction and braking seems quite good and the main difficulty I am having is mid-corner as the softer tyres had some graining on the fronts during my long run. We need to think about that in terms of what it means for the race."
Sebastien Buemi: "We had a busy programme, evaluating various parts on the car and in the second session, I reverted to some of the older components while Jaime stayed on the new one, to get a clearer picture. Now we have to study the data carefully, because at the moment, it is hard to tell what improvement the new parts bring. We had no technical issues, so we ran trouble free in both sessions, which means we have a clear understanding of the tyres. As usual here on the first day, the problem is that you do not get much grip from the tyres because the track surface is dirty, so at first we struggled a bit, although this afternoon on the Option tyre, the grip level clearly improved. But we still need to work on improving the rear end grip for tomorrow."
