De Vries: 'I believe we were slightly out of position'

Nyck de Vries - perhaps to his own surprise - found himself high up in the standings during Friday's first practice session in Barcelona. In the second free practice session, he was less competitive with his AlphaTauri, but the Dutch rookie did finish one place ahead of teammate Yuki Tsunoda. Despite finishing 16th at the end of the afternoon, the former Formula E champion was satisfied.

In a press release from his team, De Vries looked back on his first day at the Barcelona circuit: "It’s been a decent day for us, especially FP1," he said. "I believe we were slightly out of position, but we hit the ground running fairly well. During FP2, we didn’t quite get everything together. We tried different things and I think they will give us a better idea for tomorrow to be able to put it together when it counts."

'Checking if the upgrades work'

AlphaTauri had brought a package of updates with it to Spain. "Tonight we will check how much the new upgrades are working, as it’s the first day we can have a proper read on it. There's more emphasis on the front axle with the new changes, when previously it was on both. I’m not sure whether the new layout will produce better racing on Sunday because we noticed that it was difficult to follow, but I don’t think we can jump to any conclusions too quickly."

Teammate Yuki Tsunoda was "generally" satisfied. "Overall, today went ok. We have to make some changes ahead of tomorrow’s qualifying to achieve the highest possible position because today, we ended up in the bottom part of the field. The track is definitely faster in the last two corners and harder on the tyres too. Tomorrow is a new day though, which gives us some time to work on our limitations. As usual, I will work together with the engineers tonight to improve the car as much as possible to try to make it through to Q2, and maybe even Q3 tomorrow," said the Japanese driver.