Kazuki's Japanese Blog: Friday

Posted on Saturday 03 Oct 2009 and tagged with kazuki, blog, japan, suzuka.

Today turned out to be a bit of an anti-climax for the drivers. All of us were looking forward to driving at Suzuka, but the rain limited mileage and I completed just 26 slippery laps in total.

My quickest lap of the day – 1:40.648s – was still the fastest that I’ve completed around Suzuka because I’ve never previously driven here in an F1 car. It felt quick, especially through the fast changes of direction in sector one, and I look forward to knocking another 10s off that time in the dry tomorrow. That will be quite something.

Overnight rain could result in the track being wet during tomorrow morning’s final practice session, so our first dry running of the weekend could be during qualifying. If that’s the case, we’ll have to guesstimate the dry set-up of the car – like everyone else – and that could lead to a topsy-turvy grid as some people get it right, and some wrong.

Despite the bad weather, I’ve enjoyed being at Suzuka today. It’s a great theatre for motorsport, with its undulations and unique figure-of-eight layout, and the Japanese fans proved that they’re the best in the world by braving the rain. There was a lot of support for me in the grandstands, so thank you! I felt bad that we didn’t do more running during the second session, but we’re only given three sets of wet tyres per race weekend and we didn’t want to use them all up on day one.

When I got back to the circuit hotel tonight, it was nice to switch on the television and have a choice of Japanese TV programmes to watch. That’s not something that happens a lot in F1!