The first day of practice at the Albert Park circuit ahead of the 2018 Australian Grand Prix, saw both Scuderia Ferrari drivers, Kimi Raikkonen and Sebastian Vettel, go through an extensive job of data collecting and car set-up work. At the end of the day, Kimi and Seb had covered 62 and 60 laps respectively using all three available tyre compounds (Soft, Supersoft and Ultrasoft,) running various fuel loads.
“It was a pretty normal first day here in Australia” – Kimi said, at the end of the second practice session – “Everything felt a bit different from testing, but of course it is normal when you are in a different place. The track itself felt much better than last year, in terms of grip. It looks like there are a lot of leaves, but this doesn’t really affect the driving. It’s not easy to find a good set up, but the start today was not too bad. We tried a few things and did our best to improve here and there. We are considering which way we should go and trying to figure out the best way to do that. It’s a normal story, especially at the beginning of the year. Let’s see what the weather brings tomorrow. Tonight we’ll go through all the work we have done today, we’ll pick all the positive things and see what we can do.” – Scuderia Ferrari’s Finnish driver explained, as reported by Sky Sport.
Kimi Raikkonen (1’24”214) ended the second session fourth on the time sheet, while his teammate Sebastian Vettel was fifth with a time lap of 1’24”460. With half an hour of the session remaining, the red flag came out because of debris on the start line, but the interruption only lasted a few minutes. FP3 starts tomorrow at 14h00 (04h00 CET.), while the qualifying session could take place in different conditions, as rain is expected to fall in the Melbourne area.
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