It's fact that in F1 practice, you can't really put anything down on the speed shown.  Different teams, even different cars in a team, may very well be working on something different from another team.  Toyota might be working on setup, Ferrari on tire wear, Toro Rosso just going out to set high speeds, and Super Aguri on finding funding.

However, there are times where you might be able to glean some nuggets of information from a practice, and today's second practice is probably one of those times.  With both championships up for grabs, Lewis Hamilton came out early in P2 and blew the rest of the field away with a 1:35.750.  Nobody else broke the 1:36 barrier, despite having nearly 90 minutes to shoot at it.  Hamilton's main competition for the Driver's Championship, Felipe Massa, put up a 1:36.480, good for 6th best on the day. 

And all this after stomping over everybody in Friday's first practice, too.  Again, it's dangerous to base anything on Friday practice numbers, but those numbers have to make you sit up and take notice.

In other news, HWMNBN still has a few issues with his year at McLaren.  During Thursday's pre-race interview session, HWMNBN said, flat out, he'd do whatever he could do to help Massa beat Hamilton.  Considering that HWMNBN basically despises Hamilton, this makes one wonder if we'll be seeing the Renault punting the McLaren into low earth orbit soon.  He says no, but we'll see once the heat of the race comes around.

Also, you may remember that after the Japanese Grand Prix, Sebastian Vettel and Alex "Man-Mountain" Wurz were going to climb Mt Fuji, with the plan being that they'd summit at dawn.  Indeed, they managed to do so, but Wurz was partially eaten by a yuki-onna during the descent.  While unfortunate, this will allow him to fit better in the cockpit of the car that he test drives for Honda.

Quals later!

Posted by: Wonderduck at 05:29 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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