Nico Rosberg said that the Mercedes race pace “looks reasonable” but admitted that “conditions are really tough” in Bahrain after setting the quickest time of Friday practice.
Rosberg was comfortably clear of the rest of the field in FP2 as he displayed the sort of pace that brought him pole position in China last weekend. Having been 0.446s quicker than Sebastian Vettel on low fuel, Rosberg said that the more significant laptimes were set during race simulations but that he didn’t know where Mercedes measured up against the likes of McLaren, Red Bull and Lotus.
“That was a good start to the weekend, and whilst it’s nice to be quickest today, we know that doesn’t count,” Rosberg said. “The most important thing still is to improve our race pace. For the moment, it looks reasonable but we need to analyse where we are on high fuel levels compared to our competitors and draw our conclusions. The conditions are really tough out there, so the race will be quite demanding from the tyre perspective.”
Team principal Ross Brawn believes that the team is in a good position to make progress ahead of qualifying.
“We had a very solid day of practice here today, completing some good work on both low and high fuel,” he said. “We made some progress over the day with the set-up of the car, there were no issues and, all in all, it was a very reasonable day. We’ve done our homework and know what our priorities are, so that should enable us to work out what we want to tomorrow.”
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