Kimi Raikkonen and Sebastian Vettel posted the seventh and ninth best times in their SF16-Hs at the end of Free Practice 2. This is the only race where track action starts a day earlier than usual on a Thursday. The two Ferrari men ran different programmes, as they took to the crowded Monegasque track for the usual race simulations planned for this second session. Raikkonen ran Softs and Vettel the Supersofts before both switching to the purple Ultrasofts. Kimi did 37 laps, the best in 1.16.040 while, as happened in the morning, Sebastian did two more, on his way to a 1.16.269. Quickest was Daniel Ricciardo who did a 1.14.607 in the Red Bull followed by the Mercedes duo of Lewis Hamilton (1.15.213) and Nico Rosberg (1.15.506).
Kimi Raikkonen - FP1: 1:16.912, P9; FP2: 1:16.040, P7
“It was not an ideal day, but it is still the first day of practice. In the morning I was not very happy with the car but in the afternoon we were able to improve the behaviour. There's a lot of work to do but of course this is not the easiest place when things are not running exactly as you want. It's the first time we use the ultrasoft compound in the race weekend, the feeling is that it's the best fitting tyre of all of those we have here, but we still need to find a way to make them work slightly better.”
Sebastian Vettel - FP1: 1:15.956, P3; FP2: 1:16.269, P9
“It was not a "clean" day in the office today. Our session was a bit scrappy: I touched the wall, damaged the rear wing, but luckily we were able to fix it and carry on. I just didn't get everything out of the car, couldn't find the rhythm and didn't do good laps on the ultrasoft tyres. If you look at the standings, we don't belong where we scored today. But overall the car is good and has the pace. So I am not worried for Saturday. Today our focus was not towards ranking high up, we tried a couple of things and it is fair to say that some of them didn't work. Being the first practice day, it is also difficult to see what other people did.”
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