Felipe
Massa setting the fastest time this afternoon around the
5.451 kilometres of the Shanghai International Circuit
can be seen as the icing on the cake, at the end of the
first day of practice for the Chinese Grand Prix.
However, to continue the analogy, for Scuderia Ferrari
it is the “cake” itself that matters most and that too
showed signs of being well prepared.
The speed of development in Formula 1 moves on at such a
fast pace that Fridays at a Grand Prix, particularly in
the early part of the season are incredibly hectic for
all the teams. The job sheet would be full enough if it
was simply a case of preparing the car as well as
possible for the race weekend, but these days, the three
hours of track time must also find room for testing new
components aimed at keeping the development of the cars,
the F138 in the case of the Prancing Horse, moving
forward throughout the year. So far this season, there
had not been much time to run new parts, given that the
first two races in Melbourne and Sepang took place so
far from home and only one week apart. But since the
Malaysian round, two weekends have gone by without a
race and so there’s been time to introduce a raft of new
components which all had to undergo their track debut
here in China. The engineers need to remain cool and
calm to combine this work with the more regular tasks of
a race weekend. It’s something the men from the Scuderia
have had plenty of practice at and the day went off
smoothly, with Felipe and Fernando racking up a total of
93 laps between them – 47 for the Spaniard and one less
for the Brazilian.
There was also something new on the tyre front as the
Pirelli Soft compound makes its season debut here this
weekend. Degradation was always going to be high at a
track where some of the corners seem to go on forever,
turning in on themselves and tightening up. Fernando,
who ended the day third fastest, and Felipe tried this
new compound and the harder Medium on a mix of long and
short runs and clearly the softer tyre is offering a big
performance advantage which will become evident in
tomorrow’s qualifying. Splitting the two Prancing Horse
cars on the time sheet was the Lotus of Kimi Raikkonen.
Last year’s winner here, Nico Rosberg, was fourth for
Mercedes, while Mark Webber in the Red Bull and Jenson
Button in the McLaren, completed the top six.
Fernando Alonso: “By the
end of the day, the overall feeling is positive. We
worked well and on top of that, it’s always great fun
driving the Shanghai track which has some really unique
features, such as the first corner. From one session to
the next the track conditions improved significantly,
because the other categories that ran after our morning
session cleaned the surface. The increase in temperature
means the conditions were very similar to those
predicted for tomorrow. Once again, tyres will play a
key role in this Grand Prix because of the high level of
degradation over a long run. We will have to ensure we
pick the right strategy for Sunday, as well as deciding
on which of the new parts we tried this morning to fit
to the car. As usual, we can expect a long evening
studying the data.”
Felipe Massa: “Today, I immediately had a good feeling
in the car and even if, at the start, I was not
completely happy with the performance of the Medium
compound and we were not as quick as our rivals, the
times were good all the same. When I fitted the Softs,
the car improved a lot and this meant I was able to set
the fastest time of the day. It was impressive, like
driving two completely different cars. Our race pace
looks competitive, the car is handling well on both
types of tyre and degradation was not excessive, even if
the higher wear rate of the Soft compared to the Medium
compound will be an important factor when it comes to
choosing the right strategy. I feel confident and hope
that the whole weekend can keep moving in this
direction”.
Pat Fry: “Today we managed to complete our programme
without any problems, which is extremely positive for
the rest of the weekend. In the morning, we concentrated
on analysing various aerodynamic updates we brought here
to Shanghai, the result of a lot of hard work back in
the factory on the car development front. The first
signs are that the updates appear to match our
expectations, but we need to analyse the data carefully
to make a more accurate evaluation, in terms of which
ones we can use for this race and the upcoming ones. In
the second session, we continued to work on various
specifications with both drivers, doing some set-up work
aimed at finding the right balance on both cars.
Obviously, we did the normal comparison between the two
types of tyre that Pirelli has brought here to Shanghai,
with the Soft compound making its debut. The race pace
from both F138s is interesting, but once again there is
the unknown factor of tyre performance: the Softs seem
to degrade quite quickly, while the Mediums offer better
stability and last longer. Now we can expect a long
night ahead of us to decide on the best combinations for
qualifying and the race, with a lot of data to go
through.”
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