2013 Australian GP - Albert Park

[spadeflush]

Rosberg using black camera T-bar? Thought red and fluorescent yellow was the norm for all teams.

EDIT: even JB, SV and Kimi have a black T bar. Might ve been a stupid question on my part

As of 2013 and onwards the primary driver will be black/carbon fibre coloured and the secondary to remain as fluorescent yellow...mods please move both of our posts to the 2013 Australian GP thread

Thanks for confirming that!

[Huntresa]

my heart just sank looking at the times....Redbull and vettel look strong...... .....ferrari seem way off again......and look at where Sauber is 2.2 secs off....I hope this season is competitive and not a Redbull runaway......

Haha are you trolling or wat? Its the first 2 practices of the season with new tyres and no one is way off, it was RB, Merc,Lotus and Ferrari within 1 second.

[pocketmoon]

Merc look good but the slower car is consistently 0.8sec slower than the fastest times thus far. They've clearly made up some pace over 2012 but it looks like could be around 0.5 off the pace in the race.

not forgetting though that they led fp2 this time last years

[clipsy1H]

my heart just sank looking at the times....Redbull and vettel look strong...... .....ferrari seem way off again......and look at where Sauber is 2.2 secs off....I hope this season is competitive and not a Redbull runaway......

Haha are you trolling or wat? Its the first 2 practices of the season with new tyres and no one is way off, it was RB, Merc,Lotus and Ferrari within 1 second.

lol?? what you expect ??? with almost no regulation change??/ sure Red Bull will hare the best car... you can't lose over 3-4 months your pace and others can't get over few months 1-2 seconds.
At the moment Vettel can't lose pole probably he will fight with Lewis Webber and maybe Kimi for first place. but about pace i think Mercedes is much slower than Red Bull

[muz]

my heart just sank looking at the times....Redbull and vettel look strong...... .....ferrari seem way off again......and look at where Sauber is 2.2 secs off....I hope this season is competitive and not a Redbull runaway......

Haha are you trolling or wat? Its the first 2 practices of the season with new tyres and no one is way off, it was RB, Merc,Lotus and Ferrari within 1 second.

lol?? what you expect ??? with almost no regulation change??/ sure Red Bull will hare the best car... you can't lose over 3-4 months your pace and others can't get over few months 1-2 seconds.


Mclaren did

[Lorenzo_Bandini]

Quali pace, Red Bull is way faster than everybody, then Mercedes, Lotus and Ferrari.
Race pace : Red Bull just behind Ferrari, and then Lotus and Mercedes.

EDIT : And Mclaren... Itr's shocking, MW said some very strong words in the press conference.
It's seriously looks like Ferrari last year after the testing.

[Pandabeer]

Red Bull scares me a bit. I hope they are not too far ahead of the other teams and McLaren.. i have to wait till qualifying until i believe that they are not a front running team at the start of the season.

[Cam]

Horner probably says it best:

"I think McLaren had a very good car last year," explained Horner ahead of the season-opening Australian Grand Prix.

"Arguably for large parts of the season they had the fastest car, so they will know their own reasons why they have chosen to go the route they have.

"But they have good reasons to do so, and we will see at the end of the year if it is the right decision or not."

Source

[StrikeForceF1]

well 4 teams withing 1 sec is actually a huge gap in F1.....granted I missed all of FP1 and most of FP2 so like in testing there is alot of variables....granted.....just from the little I heard that Nando was not able to improve his time alot on the ss and that is suppose what made me feel more disheartened....i don't know what happened most of the sessions or how the cars look out on track....but I would've guessed that teams would have been able to close up to the bulls.....another thing that doesn't feel comfortable is that the bulls almost always sandbag through Fp sessions which from recent history leads me to believe that they have even more pace in their tank and that is not very encouraging....sorry if it sounds like trolling just I don't have alot of info....if others have more info on what happened in the Fp's and can see better than I can than please let me know whats going on...or what are your opinions

[muz]

RE Mclaren

My understanding was the 2012 car had almost reached its full potential and could not be developed much further so they change in philosophy was to allow them to develop further and reach a higher level

However, surely if old car is faster initially than new car you run old car and test bits for new car until you get it to the point where its the same speed as old car then swap cars?

Maybe I am being a bit over simplistic in this but Red Bull showed last year you can almost bring a totally new car to a race part way through the season

[gandharva]

Doesn't look well for RBR challangers in terms of one lap performance. Vettel did his fastest lap in his second try with SS (had to lift because of Maldonado) and also reported KERS problems via radio. Still 3 tenth ahead of webber... Their race pace also looks strong.

[Pandabeer]

As of now, Red Bull seems faster than McLaren. Before and while pre-season testing, there were people saying "Maybe Red Bull is not as fast as usual, because they reached the full potential at the end of 2012 and can't improve the car a lot anymore." - Same goes for McLaren, people were saying maybe the car's performance won't improve much from the end of 2012. Now, even if it's only FP1/FP2, we see a very fast Red Bull RB9, seems like they did a great job again over the winter and proving some "experts" wrong with their analyses.

It will be interesting to see if Red Bulls or McLaren's way of doing things will be best at the end of the season. Let's wait until qualifying and see if McLaren is really not there.

[rifrafs2kees]

RE Mclaren

My understanding was the 2012 car had almost reached its full potential and could not be developed much further so they change in philosophy was to allow them to develop further and reach a higher level

However, surely if old car is faster initially than new car you run old car and test bits for new car until you get it to the point where its the same speed as old car then swap cars?

Maybe I am being a bit over simplistic in this but Red Bull showed last year you can almost bring a totally new car to a race part way through the season

I think that is PR spin by Mclaren. Redbull have been fine tuning the same instrument year after year with great results.

[Crabbia]

i read on Formula1.com that Alonso had a kers problem.

Also with it being a street track dont forget that the lap times come down substantially as the session goes on and rubber is laid down. So it also matters when in the session the lap times where made.

I think this season will be as tight as last season if not tighter. No team seems to have a silver bullet and as has been said before constant regs leads to designs converging.

[stefan_]

I only saw FP2 and from the onboard footage it seems like the RBR has a good stability (slight oversteer sometimes) but a good one-lap performance. Ferrari are in the same are, Lotus probably somewhere around there but it's hard to tell because Kimi combined one-lap flyers with 10-12 laps stints.

Mercedes seem to be good on the one-lap flyers but on long stints it doesn't help much if your car goes straight when it should take a corner or the gearbox has problems.

I have no idea what McLaren is doing. The guys from Williams said yesterday that they are still evaluating aero packages, don't know it they did it in FP1 or continued in FP2 (to me it seemed that they were still evaluating in FP2).