Pin ‘building confidence’ and relishing Qatar challenges after promising Day 1 pace

Doriane Pin was delighted by how she and her PREMA Racing team fared during the opening day of in-season testing in Qatar.

A solid P5 result in the morning was followed up by a rapid final hour of running in the afternoon, with the Mercedes driver steadily finding more and more pace to secure the fastest time of Day 1.

Reflecting on a hard day’s work, Pin said: “It feels good, I'm pretty happy about the first day. I think it's a challenging track, but a very exciting track (with) high-speed corners mainly. We’re pretty happy about the job we did today with the team overall.

“The team is quick, so this is positive. We did few performance runs and also a long run, and we have some ideas already about how it's going to be for the race weekend. A really important day complete and I’m ready for the next two days. We are lucky to drive today so we’re going to enjoy them and still keep working hard.”

Pin’s quickest effort of a 1:56.848 came moments before a session-ending Red Flag in the afternoon, putting her over two tenths clear at the top of the timing sheets. The margin of improvement came as somewhat of a surprise for the French racer given how quickly the circuit evolved late on.

“I really like the track overall,” said Pin. “Sector 2 is fun because there are a lot of technical corners. Sector 3 in high-speed is pretty nice, and that's the most challenging sector I would say of the track. We really had to build confidence to carry the speed in and the track improved massively in terms of the grip.

“The last 30 minutes of today were impressive with the balance of the car, but also the grip level. I can’t wait to imagine (what it’s going to be like) next to Formula 1 on the race weekend. Maybe it’s going to be even quicker, so I enjoyed driving today very much.”

Completing 57 laps on her first introduction to the Lusail International Circuit, Pin says you can’t understate the valuableness of testing and she’s planning on chasing a return to the top of the timing sheets on Day 2.

READ MORE: Pin leads the way on opening day of Qatar in-season testing

“We are really lucky to have this amount of testing this year,” she noted. “It’s really good for keeping improving yourself and with the team and for the learning process in our early career. This is really essential.

“(Having) three days where we don’t know the track, obviously it’s good to prepare for the race weekend. Compared to Singapore for example, where we couldn’t test before and we had one Free Practice before Qualifying.”

Pin added: “(I’ll be) working on the last sector. We are missing one tenth, one tenth is not big, but I think we can improve on our driving and also on the car. We keep working, test a few things to improve even more and be even faster.”