With dry conditions expected over the rest of the weekend, today’s running on the intermediate and wet weather tyres will have taught the teams very little.
“There is nothing we really learned today so everything needs to be done tomorrow,” confirmed Lewis Hamilton. “It is slippery, wet and there was also aquaplaning; not the most exciting conditions.”
As a result there’s little data to analyse from Friday’s rain-hit practice sessions. Persistent rain at Suzuka today will leave teams trying to condense four hours of practice into tomorrow morning’s one-hour session.
In final practice teams will need to get a move on to refine their base set-ups, conduct race simulation long runs and get a qualifying simulation done on the medium compound tyres. The latter is especially important due to the difficulties of overtaking at Suzuka, where there is only one DRS zone.
All the drivers will be hoping no one puts their car into a barrier and interrupts the session, costing everyone track time. That’s an ever-present danger at Suzuka where run-off is minimal in places.
The rain is a particular setback for the lies of Carlos Sainz Jnr, Felipe Nasr and the Manor drivers, all of which are experiencing the challenge of Suzuka for the first time this weekend.
Longest stint comparison – second practice
This chart shows all the drivers’ lap times (in seconds) during their longest unbroken stint. Scroll to zoom, drag to pan, right-click to reset:
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ColdFly F1 - @coldfly (@)
25th September 2015, 15:56
And now back toSuzuka Friday practice.
Not easy to predict the top five.
I guess Mercedes will be the team to beat with Vettel closer. I don’t think RBR or TR is close enough, thus rest of top 5 between Raikkonen and Williams.
PorscheF1 (@xtwl)
25th September 2015, 16:38
Powering out of the hairpin and accelerating out of Spoon are two places where Red Bull will lack plenty of time to push them out of the top 5 I think.
Sensord4notbeingafanboi (@peartree)
25th September 2015, 23:00
As of now, according to weather forecast, Friday practice was useless, anyway I surely enjoyed watching a surprisingly high number of cars running on wet conditions, which lends it self to beautiful shots. I wonder how much impact if any the 20 psi rear tyre pressure will affect the GP.
juan fanger (@juan-fanger)
25th September 2015, 23:33
Wow, this guy is cool. I reckon most people would get somewhat excited aquaplaning at 300kph.