Valencia - Friday & EBD Changes

I'd say so far so good sums up the day at the end of both Friday practice sessions. P2 for Vitaly in FP1, in which all drivers kept to the prime tyre (The medium compound making it's full weekend debut as the prime for this meeting). Obviously 2nd place on the board looks great and you can't really extrapolate any negatives from this result but there are a few considerations to take from this.

1. Renault have consistently been more competitive on the prime relative to the rest of the field versus the option. (I should say though that the most stark example of this was surely Monaco, where the prime tyre was the soft compound, which is the option compound for this weekend, so maybe we'll see an adequate improvement once we strap the options on, FP2 results suggest this might be a tad optimistic).

2. At least three places are potentially unaccounted for from this session. Allegedly Vettel was running with the modified engine mapping required to meet the regulations that are coming into play next round at Silverstone. (More on this later in the post, for now suffice to say it took him out of contention for the top end of the FP1 leaderboard.) On top of this, both Mclaren's were supposedly running with their DRS disabled.

With these factors taken into account, it's not a great surprise that come the end of FP2, the Renault's found themselves 9th and 10th after 'hot laps' on the options.

Also, I wanted to say a little bit on the EBD (I'm unsure, but I'm assuming Exhaust Blown Diffuser) changes, the official F1 site says "Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel had a troubled morning", from being able to listen to the onboard and with the insight of David Croft and Anthony Davidson, it seems more likely that Vettel was actually using FP1 to test the performance of the car once it had been restricted to the upcoming regulations with regards to the EBD. And with regards to Renault, let's hope that the amount of noise caused by the EBD isn't an indication of how important it is to our downforce. The difference for the Red Bull at least seems to be pretty considerable with 2.5 seconds between FP1 leaderboard topper Mark Webber and teammate Vettel, perhaps throw in a few more tenths as well considering the average difference between the two in raw pace this season.