While Fernando Alonso was having a rather distressing start to his home grand Prix in Spain on Friday, on the other side of the McLaren garage, his teammate Stoffel Vandoorne had a much more productive day.
The first practice session was spent evaluating new aero components, and although planned set-up changes split his running in two, he finished the morning with 24 laps under his belt, and set the 13th fastest time.
In FP2, the focus switched to longer, higher fuel runs.
Despite an interruption due to a red flag to clear debris out on track, Stoffel completed 36 laps without any issues, and once again finished the session in P13.
“I've definitely had one of my best Fridays so far. It's the first time that I've had a Friday this season without any big problems – we ran through our programme without any big issues, so that was good,” he said.
“Everything ran smoothly on my side, however, we saw that on Fernando's side it was a bit more complex. Unfortunately, he missed FP1 and didn't do so many laps in FP2, so it still shows that reliability is one of the key issues we have to work on for the next few races.”
“We've brought quite a few upgrades to this race, but at the moment it's different to judge any of them individually. At the moment, everything is working pretty much as expected, and tonight there's a lot to analyse to see exactly how the day ran. Hopefully tomorrow we can fine-tune everything a bit, and extract a little bit more.”
