Red Bull had a productive day in São Paulo

Sebastian Vettel (FP1: Position: 3, Best Time: 1:25.387, Laps: 17 / FP2: Position: 2, Best Time: 1:27.531, Laps: 10): “We knew it would be wet today and might be tricky. The main loss from the rain was that we didn’t run on the 2014 tyres. Not many people went out this afternoon in order to save tyres for the weekend - it’s a bit of a shame for those in the grandstands, but unfortunately it’s like this. Come Saturday and Sunday, we may need to have the tyres available. It was good to get a bit of a base line in these conditions; we need to be sharp for the next two days and make the right calls.”

Mark Webber (FP1: Position: 6, Best Time: 1:25.797, Laps: 17 / FP2: Position: 3, Best Time: 1:27.592, Laps: 18): “We were working on understanding the tyres in both conditions today, we had the full wet and intermediate tyres on the car and we did quite a few laps considering most people only used one set of intermediate tyres. It was a productive day in preparation for tomorrow, as we expect some more wet conditions. We have to understand the inters on both long and short runs and also try to save tyres, so it was a testing day for the teams, but overall we got what we could out of the day.”

Top Marks

We’ve always known that Mark has a devoted fan base but when we asked them to help us prepare for his final grand prix by sending in tributes to the great man in our #MakeYourF1Mark competition we were simply blown away by the incredible response – and by the lengths they went to celebrate his stellar career.

From the thousands of messages we received thanking Mark, we’ve assembled the very finest and created a framed collage which we’re presenting to Mark at Interlagos ahead of his final F1 start.

The best-of-the-best though not only get pride of place in the artwork, but also bagged some great prizes. Overall winner Dina Akrivi, who sent in an incredibly intricate video featuring a tour of a circuit showing every phase of Mark’s career, will get to meet her hero when we return from Brazil, and Mark will also hand over a fireproof top he will wear during his 215th race weekend. She’ll also get a full tour of our Milton Keynes factory plus a goody bag and a signed Mark Webber canvas.

More follows…

Second place went to Malika Saidova for her amazingly detailed pointillist portrait of Mark. She’ll get an open-faced Infiniti Red Bull Racing Mark Webber helmet, a replica Pirelli wind tunnel tyre, a goody bag and a signed Mark Webber canvas.

The standard was so high that in the end we couldn’t decide on an outright third-place entry, so we chose three: Alice Poole’s awesome Lego tribute featuring the flag colours of all the nations F1 visits, Ruta Stankeviciene pictorial tribute to F1’s boldest jawline and Yvonne Bruhnke’s brilliant painting of Mark. All three win goodie bags.

Red Bull Racing