On the day that the two Scuderia Ferrari cars carried decals celebrating one and a half centuries of Italian Unity, between them, Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso completed nearly a century of laps during the three hours of free practice: the Spaniard, whose every appearance was greeted by fans chanting his name, did a total of 49, ending the day fourth fastest, with the Brazilian completing two less than his team-mate to post the eighth time.

The Scuderia job sheet produced by the engineers was one of the busiest seen this season: of course there was all the usual work of doing the tyre comparisons, evaluating set-up and so forth, but on top of that, the new type of rear wing and its management system, which until today had only been tried on the bench and in one day of straight-line aero testing, was given its first real track test. In addition, there were other minor aero updates to be evaluated and, because in-season testing is banned, other components were run with a view to more long-term development. The day went well with no technical issues and so the team can now spend a long night deciding the best way to proceed for qualifying and the race. The championship might have made the big trip back to Europe, but it does not look as though there are going to be any big changes in the hierarchy of the teams, with it all being very close at the top.

At the top today at the end of the afternoon session were the two Red Bull Racing cars; Sebastian Vettel ahead of Mark Webber. Michael Schumacher was third for Mercedes, just fractionally quicker than Alonso on their respective best laps. Lewis Hamilton was fifth for McLaren with Robert Kubica completing the top six for Renault.

There was also something really new on both cars: the logo of the committee organising the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of a United Italy. “It is an honour for us to have on our cars this logo which marks such an important date for the Italian people and for our country,” commented Stefano Domenicali. “We wanted to honour this event on behalf of the whole company. Back to the daily work on the race track, we can claim to be reasonably satisfied with what we saw today. It is always difficult to draw conclusions after the first two free practice sessions, but I think we can be in the hunt in both qualifying and the race.”

Fernando Alonso: “It’s always nice to race in Barcelona, in front of so many fans, even on a Friday morning: it is definitely a source of extra motivation for me to do well. We worked with different fuel loads, both for qualifying and the race. We are reasonably happy with how things went and with the performance of the updates we tried on track, but we will have to wait until tomorrow to really understand where we stand compared to the other leading teams. As for the new rear wing, we will decide this evening whether or not to also use it in qualifying and the race: the system worked well but obviously, despite the fact we have tested it on various occasions, we still lack a bit of experience before we can get the best out of it.”

Felipe Massa: “The updates we brought here have definitely allowed us to make a step forward in terms of performance, but other teams haven’t been sitting around twiddling their thumbs. We still have work to do to find the ideal balance on the car, because today it was not as good as on the last two days of the test we did here last February. Probably the track conditions are very different to what they were then, as is always the case on the first day’s running, but clearly we have to study the data carefully to understand which direction to go in, in terms of setting up the car.”

Chris Dyer: “We are very happy with the work we did today. We had a very complicated programme to run, with many new technical elements to test, both for this race and for the more long-term future. We managed it, which means we now have a lot of data to analyse. On top of that, we also worked through the usual preparation of the cars for qualifying and the race, including the comparison between the two types of tyre available. From what we have seen, we can expect the usual very close battle, both in qualifying and the race.”

Friday details:

First session Second session
Driver Pos. Time Laps Pos. Time Laps Chassis
F. Alonso 8th 1.22.258 19 4th 1.20.819 30 283
F. Massa 12th 1.22.975 21 8th 1.21.302 25 284

Weather
First session: air 15/17 °C, track 17/23 °C; partially cloudy.
Second session: air 18/17 °C, track 25/23 °C; partially cloudy.