Hirohide Hamashima - Bridgestone Director of Motorsport Tyre Development, said:
"Today was very much a standard first day of practice. The cars are much quicker compared with last year's Friday running, however we have seen a lot of graining, especially with the soft tyre, but also with the medium tyre too. This graining has an effect on the degradation of the tyres, but tomorrow we hope that the circuit surface is improved which will mean better consistency. The amount of graining we have seen shows us that changing the tyre allocation a step harder was correct though. If we had brought the soft and super soft tyres, as we used last season, the graining and degradation would have been far worse. Of course, the weather is often a challenge here in Brazil and today has been very cool, but we saw similar conditions last year on Friday, only for Sunday's race to be very hot."