Spanish GP 2009 - Circuit de Catalunya

[Gonner]

BMW put a lot of hope and money into this supercomputer, they managed to jump from last to 3rd and 4th, but Heidfeld had a lot of problems this morning before setting this top time.

The Qualif' tomorrow will give much more infos.

[Ciro Pabón]

Ciro, who are you cheering for ?...

Alonso, I guess, because I'm spaniard. I rooted for JPM because I'm also a colombian, but not too much. Finally, I think Massa has the balls of a lion. Anyway, I don't take sides on any driver, but on the things they do or say (the same philosophy most of the people displays at the forum with their fellow members, btw ).

All of them drivers are good for me. I like the apparent personality of Kazuki, Kubitza, Heidfeld, Piquet, but I don't know them. I only dislike drivers who claim they're the best, and then I only dislike what they say, not themselves, and I tend to forget the bad things.

Truly, I admire the entire grid, they drive better than I do. When I tried the circuit at Cartagena I was 4 seconds slower than the slowest... not that bad.

In the end, with all due respect, to me, ranking drivers is like an amateur painter claiming that Dalí is bad and Picasso is good: ridiculous in its pretentiousness. Drivers know, we can only glimpse what's happening behind the pit wall.

To me, all professional drivers are nuts that drive like crazy people. An amateur, like us, cannot have the degree of mindlessness about his own well being that professionals display. After a while you learn to respect the bravery displayed by professionals and understand that unless you were suicidal you wouldn't dare to take a real car to the limit all the time without blinking, like they do. That's the reason why I fail to understand criticisms to professionals, much more to F1 drivers, the cream of the cream.

Besides, I do not root for a team (Minardi was the last one I liked), I find hard to root for a corporation.

Actually, what I really want in racing (and in other sports) is for the underdog to win. Right now, I would forget about Hamilton claims of being the best and be happy if he wins something, he's really in a bad position.

[Gonner]

Okay.
This year's regulations have at least one good point : there's only 1.1 second between Rosberg (1st) and Fisi (12th)

[ben_watkins]

Fastest man Rosberg has stopped at side of track with a fault

[Ciro Pabón]

When is the next practice or whatever scheduled?

[Scotracer]

When is the next practice or whatever scheduled?

FP3 tomorrow before qualifying.

[Miguel]

When is the next practice or whatever scheduled?

Next practice starts on Saturday 11:00 CET, which I suppose is 5:00 am in Colombia.

[MattF1]

Fastest man Rosberg has stopped at side of track with a fault

Out of fuel apparently.

[paused]

BMW put a lot of hope and money into this supercomputer, they managed to jump from last to 3rd and 4th, but Heidfeld had a lot of problems this morning before setting this top time.

To be 100% acurate they didn't spend any money on their HPC nodes. They had some nice blank space on their cars and Intel had all this shiny PC gear

A few squiggles on a bit a paper and hey presto an XX Terraflop HPC gets built.

[roost89]

Did anyone else notice how floppy Alonso's mirrors were? I was hoping they didn't fall off!

Toyota engined teams locking out the top and bottom of the sheets It'll be nice to see how Toyota and Williams do on this track. The same with the Ferrari and McLaren (except Brawn) engined lads. The customer teams seem to be running at similar speeds to the factory teams.

[Ciro Pabón]

When is the next practice or whatever scheduled?

Next practice starts on Saturday 11:00 CET, which I suppose is 5:00 am in Colombia.

Thanks Miguel, actually it's 4:00 a.m., I think.

[jon-mullen]

I must've missed something, why were there only 19 cars? I believe it was Sutil missing?

[vyselegend]

An intersesting opening to the week end, but Nico running out of fuel (if that's really what happened) put their performance in doubts. They often had a shitty race after topping some practice sessions so by experience I won't be overoptimistic anyway.

Renault's apparent resurgence seems more credible, as well as BMW's, because those two team are well known for always running heavy in friday practice.

KERS is definitly NOT the item to have if you aim at the top ten... I wonder if Ferrari & Mc Laren will stick on racing it or if they will dump it for the race. The dilemna is that it is a huge advantage at the start, and Barcelona being a boring processional race, it can be worth jumping a few place at the launch, and then do a Trulli for the reminding race...

[axle]

I must've missed something, why were there only 19 cars? I believe it was Sutil missing?

He had a problem, not sure what.

[jon-mullen]

You're right, from F1.com:
Adrian Sutil, P1 - 1:23.536, 20th; P2 - no time, 20th
“Unfortunately in the afternoon we couldn't do any running as there was a problem with the fuel cell and we couldn't make the change in time to get out for the session. In any case we have our information for the set up this weekend from winter testing so I don't think it will be a big problem tomorrow. FP1 was okay, we just tested the tyres available this weekend. We struggled a bit with the soft tyres and I wasn't too happy with the time in the end, but Giancarlo got a lot of running in so we know what direction to take.”

I'm sure it won't keep him from finishing where he usually does.