
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.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Related
Recent Comments