The pointless Saturday morning practice session at Suzuka (Part 3)
With just two timed laps, the final practice session continued as the teams pondered over the track conditions.
After 46 minutes in to the session, the run through the Casio Triangle before heading towards start-finish involved driving through water around an inch deep. Kubica decided to come out and was barely on the throttle as he cruised along the back straight
and back towards the pits. He saved a wobble on that big puddle in the final chicane before heading back for the safety of the Renault garage. This was clearly enough for the Renaults. With just over 10 minutes remaining in the session, the rain continued
to flood the track even more.
With just two lap times on the board, Alguersuari was quickest with 1m55.902s and Glock is second with 2m07.497s. A river could be seen clearly after that which was running down the hill from the exit of the Casio Triangle. It was more than an inch deep.
Unsurprisingly, no cars were to be found on the almost flooded track.
An interesting visitor to Suzuka this weekend was Michael Schumacher’s brother Ralf Schumacher. He is a DTM driver currently, and visited the track to support his brother.
The radars showed that Suzuka was now experiencing the heaviest rain during the morning period and it seems that things were getting worse. Lewis Hamilton bravely left the pits in his McLaren to check out the conditions. Let us just hope he does not crash
again.
With just five minutes remaining in the session, Hamilton’s car was barely visible through the intense rain and he was already struggling to hang on to his car through the early part of the lap. Over the next two or three hours, rain of a greater intensity
than this was forecasted by the officials to arrive from the south.
Hamilton reported that it was "unbelievable" with "massive rivers". He completed a steady tour and headed back to the pit garage. On the Japanese Grand Prix weather page yesterday,it was mentioned that heavy rain was due for a final practice and that the
rain would intensify to become 'torrential' for qualifying. It played out exactly that way and given the level of water currently on the circuit, qualifying was under serious threat.
Alonso stepped out of his Ferrari and clearly did not plan another run this morning before the flag was waved out on a heavily disrupted session at Suzuka. With just a couple of lap times in the timesheets, it seems that the practice session was useless
for the teams.
This is a huge threat for Lewis Hamilton as he was already not able to test his new parts on Friday due to a silly accident. The Ferraris were not looking too strong either as both of them finished behind the Red Bulls as the Red Bulls topped the charts
on Friday. However, those times do not matter anymore as the conditions are completely different now and it seems that they will stay the same way until the end of the weekend. It will be a matter of luck and gamble now, as there is nothing the teams can do
in order to secure a good performance for the weekend ahead.
The teams unaware and unprepared, will move on to the qualifying session which is set to take place this Sunday as the rain flooded the track and the session had to be postponed.
It will be an exciting Sunday with a rare qualifying session followed by a race routine for the Formula 1 drivers. These conditions might help the British driver Lewis Hamilton as all the cars will now be unprepared like him so he should keep his fingers
crossed for the race and qualifying session this Sunday.
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