Sutil leads Bahrain Friday practice 1

Adrian Sutil in FP1 this morning

The first practice session of the year got underway today in Sakhir, Bahrain, with Adrian Sutil topping the timesheets, with Felipe Massa also showing impressive consistency throughout.

Ferrari and McLaren also lead at certain points, but Sutil managed the two fastest laps of the session to take the top spot. The strange thing, to many people today, was that the times were much slower than last year. Adrian’s fastest lap was a 1.56.583. Compare this to Jarno Trulli’s pole position lap of 1.33.431, and you can see how much fuel they were carrying. However, you must also bring into the equation the extended circuit length, which may make up for a lot of this extra time.

As I said earlier, Felipe Massa in the Ferrari showed the most promise this morning. 10 of his 19 laps were within 1% of his fastest lap, which was a 1.57.055. He finished 4 tenths off Sutil’s time.

The most worrying aspect of today, however, is the complete lack of pace, or none at all, shown by the three new teams. Virgin only set a time for Timo Glock, who only got 8 laps in, with a best time of 2.03.680. Lucas di Grassi only did an in and an out lap, which means he didn’t set a time. Lotus were slightly slower than Glock,  but more consistent, with Kovalainen and Trulli setting 21 and 15 laps respectively.

Then we get to HRT, who set no laps at all. Bruno Senna went out for 3 laps, but didn’t set a time. Worse still, the car was reported to be all over the place to drive, with extreme handling problems. More on this soon.

Adrian Sutil was very happy with his pace this morning, saying:

"It's time to race now after so long out of the car. This morning we
 were checking all the systems and setup we learnt over testing but 
nobody really knew where we were going to be.

It's our goal to get two cars through to Q3 for this weekend and 
I think we now have a very good baseline with the car and good downforce 
compared to last year.

We can be a top ten runner with this car this year and myself and Tonio 
are working well together. If we can qualify in the top ten now, it can 
lead to decent points which is, at the end of the day, what we want to 
do consistently this season. I would say it's a promising start to get 
there, for sure."

An analysis piece on both practice sessions should be up by tonight.

Times from Friday practice 1:

Position	Driver	Car	Fastest lap	Difference	# of laps
1	Adrian Sutil	Force India-Mercedes	1.56.583		18
2	Fernando Alonso	Ferrari	1.56.766	0.183	18
3	Robert Kubica	Renault	1.57.041	0.458	19
4	Felipe Massa	Ferrari	1.57.055	0.472	19
5	Jenson Button	McLaren-Mercedes	1.57.068	0.485	19
6	Lewis Hamilton	McLaren-Mercedes	1.57.163	0.58	19
7	Vitantonio Liuzzi	Force India-Mercedes	1.57.194	0.611	19
8	Nico Rosberg	Williams-Cosworth	1.57.199	0.616	15
9	Mark Webber	Red Bull-Renault	1.57.255	0.672	17
10	Michael Schumacher	Mercedes GP	1.57.662	1.079	16
11	Jaime Alguersuari	Toro Rosso-Ferrari	1.57.722	1.139	18
12	Nico Hulkenberg	Williams-Cosworth	1.57.894	1.311	20
13	Sebastian Vettel	Red Bull-Renault	1.57.943	1.36	17
14	Sebastien Buemi	Toro Rosso-Ferrari	1.58.399	1.816	13
15	Rubens Barrichello	Williams-Cosworth	1.58.782	2.199	11
16	Vitaly Petrov	Renault	1.58.880	2.297	13
17	Pedro de la Rosa	Sauber-Ferrari	2.00.250	3.667	18
18	Kamui Kobayashi	Sauber-Ferrari	2.01.388	4.805	11
19	Timo Glock	Virgin-Cosworth	2.03.680	7.097	8
20	Heikki Kovalainen	Lotus-Cosworth	2.03.848	7.265	21
21	Jarno Trulli	Lotus-Cosworth	2.03.970	7.387	15
22	Lucas di Grassi	Virgin-Cosworth	N/A	N/A	2
23	Bruno Senna	HRT-Cosworth	N/A	N/A	3
24	Karun Chandhok	HRT-Cosworth	N/A	N/A	0

Pictures will be added when possible.