FIA F1 - Barcelona Mercedes/Petronas GP Practice Report

MERCEDES GP PETRONAS drivers Nico Rosberg and Michael Schumacher finished today's practice sessions at the Circuit de Catalunya in sixth and seventh places respectively on the timesheets.

The team's programme for today focused on evaluating the new developments to the MGP W02 car for this weekend.

Tyre evaluations, particularly with the new Pirelli hard compound tyre, took priority in the afternoon session.

Nico completed 64 laps today, with Michael covering 62 laps, as the team completed a busy and successful programme.

Nico Rosberg "It was a good day in terms of set-up and we learned quite a few things about our car. Of course, it's difficult to say where we really are because the hard tyres didn't work so well today and it was very windy. However, we had a nice long run and our preparation with the car is certainly better compared to the last race. The updates are working quite well so far, and thanks for that to the boys in the factory."

Michael Schumacher "We have had quite a reasonable Friday and have clearly demonstrated an upwards tendency with our improvements seeming to work well. Saying that, the other teams have improved too, so without having had a chance to look deeper into the data, I would say that we may be fighting for the third row. We will continue to work further on our performance for tomorrow."

Ross Brawn "We have a number of new items on the car here which we wanted to evaluate today, and we have successfully achieved that. It was a pretty comprehensive programme and, as always, we will piece together all of the data tonight, and decide how we will approach the rest of the weekend. We've got to find some performance on the car, but today was a reasonable start."

Norbert Haug "A first day with a total of 126 laps for Michael and Nico gave us the opportunity to learn a lot about the new prime tyre which has not been tested before at this track. At the beginning, it looked difficult to make this tyre work for most of the teams, however we have learned a lot today which will be useful to get the set-up of our cars right tomorrow and on Sunday. Our target for the rest of the weekend is to again be in the top five as at the last two races."