iWitness in Valencia - Saturday

Posted on Tuesday 29 Jun 2010 and tagged with iwitness, europe, valencia.

There was entertainment everywhere you looked last night. In the AT&T Williams motorhome we fed and watered guests of Philips, while in the Valencia harbour the Randstad clipper put in its first race appearance since Monaco 2008. Lots of happy revellers – and it was good to keep the drivers busy of an evening...

It’s fair to say the drivers found the limit of the FW32 during qualifying, and that limit was a 1:38.428s. They set identical lap times to three decimal places and the Hulk started ahead of Rubens – in eighth place – because he set the time first. Cars have set identical lap times just once before in F1 history, in 1997, and two of the three cars involved back then were Williamses!

A funny incident occurred after qualifying today when Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel were walking from the pitlane to the press conference room. A fan stopped Lewis and asked for a photograph, which Seb duly took, and Lewis then took a pic of the disbelieving fan with Seb.

There were two Spanish motorsport gods in the F1 paddock today. Fernando Alonso was one, natch, and the other was former world rally champion Carlos Sainz. Carlos is in Valencia to support his son Carlos Jnr, who’s racing in Formula BMW this weekend.