Sebastian Vettel crashes out of first free practice session of 2011 Turkish Grand Prix – Formula 1 news
Red Bull Racing team driver Sebastian Vettel crashed out of the first free practice session of the 2011 Turkish Grand Prix.
It seems that up until now, both McLaren and Red Bull are not looking as good as Ferrari and Mercedes GP.
This time, Fernando Alonso scored the fastest time of the session around 1.4 seconds faster than both of the Mercedes drivers Nico Rosberg and Michael Schumacher who scored the 2nd and 3rd fastest times respectively of the session.
The track remained wet throughout the session with showers every now and then allowing the drivers to test both their full-wet and intermediate tyres. However, it seemed that testing on intermediate tyres was relatively risky as Sebastian crashed in to the
barriers on the exit of turn 8.
The reigning world champion’s RB7 rear twitched slightly before coming into the final section of the corner forcing it on the artificial grass around the outside of the circuit. The right hand side of the car was damaged completely along with the front wing
of the car.
However, Vettel was completely uninjured but the team will have to go through a tough time in order to get the car ready for the afternoon Friday practice session.
Other than that, it seems that Lotus Renault GP were looking pretty good as well since Nick Heidfeld and Vitaly Petrov scored the 4th and 5th places respectively in the timesheets.
It was disappointing to see Felipe Massa in 7th place according to the timesheets even though his teammate topped the charts of the session. Nevertheless, Ferrari are still working on their performance and it seems that according to these results,
the team is looking pretty good this weekend.
McLaren on the other hand struggled as Jenson Button was the only one to score a lap time for the team while Lewis Hamilton did not even score a single lap time. Red Bull Racing team’s Mark Webber scored the 11th fastest time of the session followed
by his teammate with the 17th fastest lap of the session.
This is the first time in 2011 that either of the Red Bull drivers crashed out of any session during a race weekend. However, the second session is expected to take place in a couple of hours time after the first free practice session and the team can try
to test Vettel’s car if they can get the car back on the track.
Otherwise, the team will then have to rely on the morning practice session on Saturday before the qualifying session in order to take the advantage over its rivals McLaren and now, even Ferrari.
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