As usual in Monaco, Thursday hosted the start of the World Series by Renault racing activities in the Principality. The most awaited and glamorous event in the WSR calendar, the Monte Carlo weekend is a very peculiar one too, with a reduced schedule that compared to a normal F.Renault 3.5 round basically halves the track time available to the teams. Just one 45′ Free Practice, followed by a single 30′ Qualifying session and only one race mean that a single mistake can have a big impact on the weekend, and that perfect working routines are needed to achieve the maximum result in the little time available.
That’s why, at their debut in the streets of Monaco, both Roberto Merhi and Roman Mavlanov agreed with the team for a cautious approach, aimed at building up confidence with the track. Focusing on avoiding mistakes on a very dirty track, Roberto and Roman upped their pace lap after lap and closed the Practice session in P15 and P16, completing 17 and 19 laps respectively, a tally that will provide the engineers useful data that will be used to set-up the cars for Qualifying.
Roman Novikov – Team Principal
“Considering it’s the debut in Monaco for most of our technical staff and our drivers, we are satisfied with what we achieved today. We didn’t have a lot of time to learn the track’s secrets, just 45 minutes disrupted by two red flags, but despite that we did a good job. Both Merhi and Mavlanov drove well, focusing more on completing the setup programme agreed with our engineers than on pushing to post a stunning laptime. Given our lack of experience here, completing as many laps as possible was paramount, sure we didn’t want to risk a contact with the armcos. The time for pushing as much as possible will come in qualifying”.