• Korean Grand Prix - FP2

Lotus likely to continue with Coanda exhausts

The Coanda-effect exhausts are likely to remain on the Lotus for the rest of the weekend © Sutton Images

Enlarge

Related Links

• Report:
• Vettel quickest as Red Bull heads practice
  

• Race:
• Korean Grand Prix

• Drivers:
• Kimi Räikkönen

• Teams:
• Lotus F1

Lotus is likely to continue running its new Coanda-effect exhausts on Saturday after a promising day of practice ahead of the Korean Grand Prix.

Kimi Raikkonen tested the new exhaust layout in Friday's two practice sessions, setting the 10th quickest time in FP2. Technical director James Allison admitted that the team has yet to make a final decision on whether it continues with the update or not, but said it is likely that the exhaust would remain on the car on Saturday.

"I think so, yeah," Allison said. "We haven't decided yet but it looks like we will.

"We're reasonably happy with the way they're working. I think we're at the beginning of a relatively long road with them, they're not straightforward to make work perfectly first go out but the numbers we're getting from them are good so we're quite pleased."

Raikkonen, however, was more cautious over the new parts, saying he expected more performance from them and that it was difficult to compare with the car's previous pace.

"We'll look at all the data and see how it is and see if we use it or not," Raikkonen said. "Let's say I would think that probably we expected a bit more than what we've seen so far but it's too early to say ... It's a completely different place; the car can feel completely different from place to place even if you don't touch it. So that's the difficult thing, and that's why we have to see still, we have to look at the data and we'll see."

Raikkonen added that he expected to be able to improve the car significantly on Saturday, but denied that the new updates had distracted the team from working on set-up.

"I think we are more or less where we usually are on Friday's, so hopefully we can improve the car and be faster tomorrow. I wouldn't say that the car felt very good today and I think we were one second off so we can get it right and we can easily get better I hope but then other people might improve also.

"We keep trying on Friday's to check some things because it's the only time you can test different things. OK you have to try to get the car right but it's just testing things otherwise you're never going to try those things. For me it's normal; I don't care about the lap times as long as you get a good understanding of the stuff and then try to put everything together tomorrow.

"We were quite slow today in a straight line for some reason. In the end it's all medium and high speed corners for the most part and then it's very slow, so the issues we have are in the medium and high speed. You have many of those so if you don't get the car right you can lose a lot of time."

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.