Alpine's Marcin Budkowski expects his cars to make it into Q3 on Saturday, having had Esteban Ocon and Fernando Alonso finish in fourth and fifth respectively on Friday afternoon. The two drivers, having shown glimpses of speed in Portugal, rose through the field in second practice to finish within 0.3 seconds of the front-running pace on the soft tyre. As a result, Racing Director Marcin Budkowski expects the two drivers to be able to make it into Q3 on Saturday having done some experimentation throughout the day. "It was a good Friday," Budkowski explained to media, including RacingNews365.com. " This morning, we were a bit further down the timesheets, but really we did some aero testing in the morning. And when you focus on testing, you do things like sustainable running or no DRS just to get the best possible data and then the laps with Esteban on the soft tyres, we just got a lot of traffic. "So we just were not specifically worried, we got the data and information we needed. The afternoon was a good session. We had good pace. Good pace on the short runs, pretty decent pace on the long runs. so happy with the day, a good day in the office really. So yeah, looks promising, looks like we can make it into Q3 tomorrow. But again, tomorrow's another day. "It's gonna be very, very close. But certainly last year, we struggled here all weekend. So we look better, better than last year for sure. And that's really good news." Budkowski explained that the team brought some upgrades to Imola, which are still being fettled onto the package which is going in the right direction. "We had an upgrade package for Imola," he explained. "We didn't have anything specific for Portugal or for here. But we're doing some experimenting. We were trying some stuff, which is related to CFD to tunnel to track correlation. "Both in Portugal and here, we got some interesting learning on the performance on the car. We're gonna bring some new parts to Monaco. "So it's good for the team in general terms of morale, but also in terms of, of build up to progress at every weekend."
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