July 20, 2012

F1 Practice: Germany 2012

Welcome to rainy Silverstone!

Nah, just kidding.  It's raining in Hockenheim as well.  Remember what I said a few days ago about these practice sessions being particularly important?  Well, the rain put paid to all that!  Oh, sure, they got some data on Intermediate tires in the first session, and a little more on the full wets in P2, but none of that is what the teams were looking for: dry and slick. 

It's not just for setup purposes.  Every race there's new pieces of kit tacked onto a car (or taken off!), all in the quest for that extra tenth of a second.  Back in the old days, when testing wasn't banned, the teams would put in 50000km or more, just cranking lap after lap to see what this new piece or that new piece could do.  Nowadays, though, the Friday practice sessions have become the test sessions... and the new bits and pieces aren't getting run in the dry.  There's gotta be a lot of frustration out there.

Left, Felipe Massa.  Right, race engineer Rob Smedley.  Center, probably the most comfortable chair ever.
Yep, obviously frustrated.

Nothing really happening other than that.  Quals in the morning, of course.  See you then!

Posted by: Wonderduck at 06:34 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 207 words, total size 2 kb.

1 Why does Rob Smedley have green hair?

Posted by: Shawn, but not lowercased shawn at July 21, 2012 12:10 PM (3yLP9)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Comments are disabled. Post is locked.
22kb generated in CPU 0.0286, elapsed 0.1215 seconds.
47 queries taking 0.1052 seconds, 234 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.