Blogging from Korea: Saturday

Posted on Sunday 24 Oct 2010 and tagged with korea, blog.

The cars ran smoothly in today’s free practice and qualifying sessions, but that didn’t make it an easy day for the team. Rubens wasn’t happy with the performance of his car in final practice, so he and his engineer, Tony Ross, decided to make a lot of changes before qualifying.

The mechanics did a fantastic job to get his car finished, which they did with about two minutes to go before the start of the session. Rubens then did a great job to make it through to Q3, despite being blocked by Michael Schumacher, but I don’t want to go into that here.

Nico was looking good for a place in Q3 as well, until he lost the rear of his car through Turn 12 on his final run and aborted the lap. He might well be better off 11th, on the clean side of the grid, because there should be more grip there.

With the Parc Fermé rules as they are, we couldn’t touch the cars after qualifying and my attentions immediately turned to next year. I made a few notes about things to ask the organisers and I also took steps to re-book our hotel in Gwangju. I’ve heard a few horror stories about the hotels in Mokpo and we’re very pleased with our place, even if it is a bit further away.

One of the guys had a small road accident en route to the hotel this evening, which needed sorting out. Everyone was fine and we were back at a reasonable hour. Now we’re all praying for a dry pack-up tomorrow night. Rain is forecast for tomorrow morning and it’s never nice to do the pack-up in the rain…