Normally, I will say that nothing occurred during Friday Practice, and it'll sound world-weary and jaded.  I mean, I've seen literally hundreds of practice sessions, and nothing of importance occurs in the vast majority of them... of course I'm going to sound somewhat beaten down and bored by the whole thing.  You've seen one practice session, you've seen 'em all.  Truly, there's very little in this world more depressing than the sight of a jaded, world-weary duck.

However, today's practice sessions at The Nurb Jr were somewhat different.  Today, nothing important or dramatic occurred, and that's exactly what we wanted.  There were no wild tire blowouts, there were no drivers boycotting the race due to safety concerns, no Pirelli executives being strung up by their wheel nuts, nothing like that at all.  For this race, the tire company from Italy has a Kevlar-backed tire, as in 2012, just with 2013's rubber compound bonded to it.  Which, coincidentally, is what they wanted to bring to Silverstone last week, but such a massive change needs to have unanimity from the teams to be approved.  Three teams (Lotus, Force India, and another that I can't find right now) refused to allow the change, saying "we built our cars to work with these tires, if the others didn't, that's their lookout." 

Well, after the issues at Silverstone, the FIA stepped in and said "make the changes, Pirelli."  They also made mandatory a number of things that Pirelli could only suggest the teams do: run the tires at a certain PSI level, limit negative camber amount, prevent teams from reversing tire sides, so on and so forth.  Methinks Jean Todt, current President of the FIA, is running for reelection.  So that's where we stand on the tire issue for this race... there'll be a new tire altogether at the next race in Hungary.  I suspect it'll be made out of wire-wrapped armor plating dipped in cyanoacrylate... no way it'll come apart.

Oh, and Marussia's Jules Bianchi had an upset tummy today and missed P1 and most of P2.  I can't tell if the foam padding has been lightly browned or not...

Quals in the morning... see you sometime thereafter!

Posted by: Wonderduck at 04:08 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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