Japanese GP Practice

Posted on Friday 02 Oct 2009 and tagged with japan, suzuka.

Objectives P1
•    Wet running and wet tyre compare
•    Aero systems checks
Objectives P2
•    Set-up tuning for the wet
•    Grid starts

Conclusions – Sam Michael, Technical Director
“It was a fairly uneventful day in terms of running the cars due to the weather. We checked both full wet and intermediate tyres and the wet set-up. Now we’ll prepare the cars for qualifying with new engines and the race gearboxes. We’ll have to be conservative on the gear ratios tonight due to no dry running at all.”

Nico Rosberg
Runs P1: Run 1 new wets (1 lap) install, run 2 scrubbed wets (4 laps) baseline, run 3 new inters (8 laps) mechanical set-up, run 4 scrubbed inters (7 laps) fuel system test  
Runs P2: Run 1 scrubbed wets (8 laps) set-up tuning for the wet and grid start
“Today was just a matter of trying out the tyres in order to get an understanding of where the change over points are and how the inters and full wets are working, degradation-wise. What was clear was that I pretty much destroyed the wets when the track dried out. With the information from both cars, we now have a good understanding of what is going on.”

Kazuki Nakajima
Runs P1: Run 1 new wets (1 lap) install, run 2 new inters (10 laps) baseline, run 3 scrubbed inters (7 laps) mechanical set-up and fuel system test
Runs P2: Run 1 scrubbed wets (8 laps) set-up tuning for the wet and grid start
 “Not a great day in terms of weather, but in terms of results it was ok. We didn’t get many laps in, but those we did get gave us a good platform for any potential wet weather running over the weekend. It looks positive, so hopefully we’ll be in the same position tomorrow for qualifying, but in the dry, preferably!”