2024 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix - Friday

Final Friday of the season completed in Abu Dhabi

• The team began what is sure to be an emotional weekend in Abu Dhabi as we bid farewell to Lewis Hamilton.
• The team ran the Medium and Soft compound tyres in both sessions, saving the Hard compound for the remainder of the weekend.
• In FP1, Lewis posted the third fastest time with George fourth quickest using the Soft tyre.
• As the sun set, both took to the track for FP2 and again used the Soft compound to set their quickest times.
• Lewis went fifth fastest, but was improving on his second push lap before a snap at turn 12 cost him time.
• George was less happy but chose only to set one time on the Soft tyre in order to focus on his long run work.
• The team return to the track tomorrow for FP3 and Qualifying.
  

Lewis Hamilton

It’s all feeling very surreal being my last weekend with the team. I’m trying to be as present as I can and enjoy every moment. I’ve enjoyed driving the car, working with everyone in the garage, with the engineers, and I’m just trying to capture the moments as much as I can. I’m aiming to channel all of my emotions into the car and the team because I have so much love for them and as always, I want to do really well for them. This weekend I have one last chance to go for it and try to do so.

I’m not planning on changing too much on the car tonight. We obviously have some work to do as the McLarens are still fast and the Ferraris are also within that mix too. So, we do need to find some time. Overall, though, my feeling with the car has been good today. It’s never easy to determine what our long run pace looks like, but it didn’t seem too bad today so hopefully that’s a positive for us. Ultimately, we have some work to do on our single lap pace and I hope tomorrow we can be closer to those ahead of us.

George Russell        

Today was a bit of a struggle, but it’s only Friday. We were also trying a lot of different things today in preparation for next year as obviously this is our last opportunity to do so. We therefore wanted to go a little more radical with the set-up options, see if there’s anything more we can learn, and test things to develop our learnings and understanding for 2025.

As we saw, Lewis did some great laps today. Still, as a team, we don’t seem to be on the pace of the very front runners on a single lap. McLaren in particular look to be in a league of their own at the moment and their pace in both sessions showed that again today. Tomorrow, I expect the Ferraris to be back in the mix but I’m hoping we can make some improvements overnight and have a more competitive showing than today.

Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director

We've had strong single lap performance at the last two races but today we've found the Soft tyre quite tricky. McLaren were clearly very fast today and they will be hard to beat this weekend, but if you look at Lewis' lap then you can see how with a few improvements he could put himself just behind.

George has a bit more to find but we were experimenting with some new setup directions and the cars were quite different for the low fuel work. We can unpick that work on the simulator overnight, but I'd expect we'll find a good direction through which George can improve for tomorrow. The long run picture was better; Lewis a bit ahead of George and like the single lap, we can see some areas that we ought to be able to improve that should put us closer to the front. We'll use FP3 to continue the work on low fuel and hope that tomorrow we'll close the day a bit nearer the top of the timing screen.