About a minute late to the party, but I'm here!  If you'd like to follow along with me, direct your browser to SPEED Streaming and refresh The Pond from time to time!  As in the past liveblogging sessions, the session is 90 minutes in length.  I'll be using the time remaining as the time notation:  if you see (1:02:30), that means 27.5 minutes have gone by in the session.  Read from (1:30:00).  Your mileage may vary.  Ask your doctor if Wonderduck's Pond is right for you.  Burma Shave.

(SESSION START)  Problem with having no commentary: you don't know why exactly a Williams was sitting in the pit lane, half-in and half-out of its garage.  Weirdness abounds here at Korea... it's not even raining!

(1:26:44)  Man, I've got a lousy feed tonight... everythings blocky and ick... and freezing.  If things don't clear up soon, I'm going to have eye cancer.

(1:25:20)  Lettuce Grosjean is about to get on track... everybody, hide the women and children!

(1:23:11)  Well, that's a little better... I shut down the stream window and now it's much prettier.

(1:21:02)  Radio call to Seb Vettel: "Check if your steering is symmetrical left-to-right."  Wow, now that would be a sucky problem to have at 180mph... unsurprisingly, Seb immediately comes into the pits.

(1:17:45)  Silly HWMNBN, that's not how you sit in a chair!

Still probably more comfortable than anything you or I could afford...

(1:14:23)  Well, that's something you don't see at every racetrack in the world:

Pity, that.

(1:10:37)  Most cars are in the garage right now.  We're getting a lot of "B-Roll" footage.  What's that, you ask?  Why, this:

Smell the excitement!  Or is that kimchee?
 
(1:08:17)  As reader "metalshields" points out, it IS like a ghost town as compared to Japan.  What I didn't tell you is that picture at (1:10:37) is the entire crowd.

(1:05:21)  Jenson Button goes to the top of the timesheets.  Don't get excited, he's only the second driver to post a time.

I'm gonna hide the rest of this in the "more" section!


(1:03:36) Shiv Hamilton is on track, everybody hide your wallets!

(1:01:44)  Wait!  I think I saw some people sitting in the grandstands down the back straight!  It's a miracle!

(58:12)  Just in case you thought I was joking about the crowd being sparse:

That's the pit straight and the main grandstand.

(52:something)  They're showing replays of Sergio Perez doing bad things to a HRT into the first turn, but I'm much more interested in what nearly happened.  Remember how I was complaining about how the pit-out feeds directly into the line of fire of a out-of-control car?

THAT right there is what I was talking about.  If either Perez or the hapless HRT lost it, that Toro Rosso would have been a cooked goose.  Has the person who thought up this track ever seen a racetrack before?  Considering that it's Hermann Tilke, it's a coin-flip.

(45:00) There are cars on track, and we're getting a long, loving look at the gold-tinted visor of Shiv Hamilton's helmet.  WTF?

(44:0   To be fair, it's not like anything exciting is happening.  Just cars lapping.

(40:11)  I'm going to admit something.  I actually think I like the final turn.  Too bad about the whole risk of instant death if there's a car slowing down for the pit-in, but other than that tiny detail...

(38:03)  Looks like Tim O'Glockenspiel isn't going to make it into the session, seeing how his car is completely disassembled and surrounded by wildly gesticulating mechanics.  Welcome to Marussia, where car races you!

(36:41)  Okay, I apologize for that. I've wanted to make a "In Soviet Marussia"-style joke for a while now.

(35:44)  Phonecall from Ph.Duck.  Sorry, gotta take this.

(27:23)  Now THAT'S something you really don't see every day...

...that, my friends, is the aerodynamic underbody of a F1 car.  You NEVER want to see that.  If you do, it means one of two things.  1) The car is upside-down, or rapidly heading to that orientation, or B) there's something seriously wrong with the guts of the chassis.  Neither is a good thing.

(20:00)  Honest to god, why do I do this?  Tim O'Glockenspiel is out and turning laps.  It was only 18 minutes and three seconds ago that I said he wasn't going to be out this session.  If there's someone out there who knows something about F1 that would like to do this job, let me know.

(18:00)  I'm not sure which is worse, the Felipe Massa (ba-dum-tssssh!) doll or the pig-thing wearing a Ferrari headset.

Seriously, what is that???

(14:02)  HWMNBN just flat-spotted one of his front tires.  And by "flat-spot" I mean more like "flat-side."  Swear to gawd, he couldn't have cause more damage to it if he had gone out with a hacksaw and just squared the circle.  No wonder the radio call went out: "How bad is the vibration?"  His response, "Quite a lot."  Which may not be grammatically correct, but it gets the point across.

(10:46)  Multi-million dollar cars, the highest-tech of the highest-tech, and drivers are out there hooning about in them like it's Saturday night and they're starring in a Vin Diesel movie.  Then you remember that most of them aren't 30 yet, and it's not so surprising after all.

(5:29)  All skate, everybody all skate.

(4:50)  Does anybody under the age of 30 actually know what "all skate" means?

(3:10)  FINALLY!  A picture of the oft-discussed Elephant!

The Red Bull at the 150m mark is on top of the Elephant, the Ferrari to the left of the Red Bull is about to begin climbing the Elephant.  If you don't remember, it's called that because, from this camera angle, it looks like the Organizers just laid asphalt over the dead body of an elephant.  From the other side, it's obviously just a gentle swelling that's about 300 feet long, but this is how it was first seen... and the Elephant was born.

(0:00)  Time's up.  So, what did we learn today?  Honestly, not a whole heckuvalot.  We did learn that it doesn't always rain in Korea, and that Shiv Hamilton was faster than HWMNBN, but otherwise?  Just another practice session where you can't tell what was going on with the individual teams.  Like, why was the undertray taken off the Williams?  Just what the heck is the doll doing in Ferrari's garage?  And will anybody show up for Sunday's race?  Stay tuned, we'll find out then!

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