Nico's Spa Blog: Friday

Posted on Saturday 29 Aug 2009 and tagged with nico, spa.

A Spa weekend without rain wouldn’t feel right, so I was unsurprised to see rain coming down as the first practice session got underway this morning. I completed a few laps to gain some experience of wet running, but I otherwise sat out the session.

The conditions were perfect in the afternoon, with the track temperature peaking at 34 degrees, so it was a very busy session as we tried to work through our set-up and tyre comparison programmes. Unfortunately, the pace of the FW31 wasn’t as good as the weather because I struggled through the quick corners in sector 2. F1 is so close this year that you only need to be a little bit off to be left exposed and we’ve got some work to do tonight to improve the balance of the car.

It looks like we’ll add a bit of wing before tomorrow’s final practice session in an effort to improve the handling through the fast corners, but we need to be careful not to compromise straight line speed too much because that will make my race very difficult.

It was confirmed today that the Abu Dhabi race on 01 November will become F1’s first ever day-night race. That sounds pretty cool, although I hear the lighting system is going to be different to Singapore and it will be interesting to see what the visibility’s like. At least we shouldn’t have to worry about rain…

Let’s hope for a better day tomorrow.