Rain had
been predicted for Friday's opening practice at
Silverstone and it was not late for its appointment,
falling heavily overnight and again from the early hours
of yesterday morning.
Lewis Hamilton, ended up quickest yesterday at the wheel
of his McLaren, however, more than ever the Friday times
meant very little and more pertinently, the conditions
made it hard for the Scuderia Ferrari engineers to
gather any useful data relating to the minor updates
introduced on the F2012 this weekend. Fernando Alonso
was one of several drivers who momentarily became a
passenger in his own car, when he aquaplaned through
deep standing water, which resulted in the nose of his
car being wiped off across a crash barrier.
An hour or so after the end of the second free practice
session, a weak and watery sun appeared over
Silverstone, raising hopes that maybe tomorrow, the dry
tyres might finally come out from under their heated
blankets, for the final hour of free practice and the
afternoon qualifying session.In the end
the F2012s completed just 32 laps yesterday, (18 from
Alonso and the other 14 from Massa) and of these, only
nine were timed (six for the Spaniard and three for the
Brazilian.) Therefore it is pretty much impossible to
draw any sort of conclusion or to make predictions when
it comes to the rest of the weekend.
Fernando Alonso: “There’s very little I
can say this afternoon, or at least even less than usual
for a Friday. We did very few laps because of the rain
and the fact that, with the number of sets of rain tyres
limited by the regulations, there was no sense in doing
more running. Rather, it was better to save tyres, given
that the forecast is definitely not encouraging, as it
is meant to rain all weekend. In other circumstances, if
the rest of the weekend was meant to be dry maybe, then
we could have done more running, but in these
conditions, as I said, that really wasn’t the case. In
the wet, the car seems okay, but it’s practically
impossible to say where we are compared to the others.
Tomorrow morning, let’s hope we can at least do a few
laps in the dry so as to least have a rough idea of the
behaviour of the Soft and Hard compounds that Pirelli
has brought here. The off track moment towards the end?
The car was aquaplaning and it got away from me. A shame
about the front wing and now we must see if we can
repair it.”
Felipe Massa: “The weather made this a
difficult day. It rained all the time and upset our
workload therefore we decided therefore to do only a
little running to save tyres for tomorrow and Sunday.
Obviously this meant we were not able to test the way we
wanted, especially when it came to the small updates we
have brought to this Grand Prix. I did only three timed
laps, so it’s impossible to say anything about how the
F2012 is behaving on this track. Tomorrow, regardless of
the conditions, we will try and do more laps to be as
well prepared as possible for qualifying and the race.
We will try and do what we can.”
Pat Fry: “Let’s say that today it would
have been more interesting to compare tortellini with
tagliatelle – or maybe Parma ham and Jamon Serrano,
rather than spending three hours on the pit wall not
even managing to complete a dozen timed laps! Joking
apart, honestly it wasn’t worth doing much running,
because the number of sets of rain tyre per driver is
very limited and also because we did not want to risk
the cars in such difficult track conditions, with so
much surface water. So the real off key moment of the
day was Fernando’s off track excursion right on his “in”
lap at the end of FP2, which resulted in a broken front
wing: now we will try and repair it for the rest of the
weekend. We feel very sorry for the many spectators in
the grandstands: unfortunately, this was the reality of
the situation and we could not do many laps just for the
sake of it. We had a few updates, nothing revolutionary,
to try but obviously, we could not do much in these
conditions. So we tried to do what we could, for example
some practice starts, putting off until tomorrow the
task of preparing for qualifying and the race.
Certainly, if the rain was to continue to play its part,
then we will have to be clever in managing the situation
as well as possible. We continue to push on the
development of the F2012, because now that we have
significantly reduced the gap to the best, compared to
where we were at the start of the season, it becomes
increasingly difficult to make progress: the pace and
effectiveness of the updates will be the key to the rest
of the season.”
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