Team Lotus have had better Fridays this season. Trulli finished the day as 20th and Heikki Kovalainen was 21st. The Anglo-Malaysian team chose to run Karun Chandhok in the first free practice. The team's third driver did a 1:30.148 and was 1.5 slower than his teammates. It was the slowest time of the day. They do however expect to make progress overnight.

Karun Chandhok
"I’m pretty pleased with the performance this morning. The car felt OK from the first laps and it was good to get some more time under my belt in the cockpit. Friday mornings are always pretty limited running, particularly when the track’s got that light covering of dust on it, but today I was focusing on some aero evaluation and we got through that program so I think I did ok today."

Heikki Kovalainen
"That wasn’t too bad but we can definitely improve. This morning’s session was brought to an early end with a sensor issue on the gearbox and I was given the instruction to pull over when the engine temperatures started rising. This afternoon we worked on both sets of tyres and I think the softs are ok but we weren’t really able to get the best out the mediums which gave us some areas to work on tonight on improving overall grip."

Jarno Trulli
"That was a trouble free Friday afternoon for me but honestly I’m not all that happy with the balance of the car at the moment. There’s quite a lot of understeer on turn-in and through the exit of the corners and we need to work on dialling that out to find more speed. There’s definitely more to come and we’ve shown all season we can take good steps forward from Friday to Saturday, so I think we’ll be ok tomorrow."