Australian GP 2012 - Albert Park

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

Long faces at Red Bull apparently. The RB8 is giving away 13Kph to Mercedes and McLaren and the team have taken off more wing to close the gap.

I think this year Red Bull do not have the luxury of adding downforce at whim. Will be interesting to see how they manage the situation.

@mahesh
The cooler tempratures mean the medium tyre works better and gives you better lap time. The moment things heat up the softer tyre gets quicker.

[mahesh248f1]

Long faces at Red Bull apparently. The RB8 is giving away 13Kph to Mercedes and McLaren and the team have taken off more wing to close the gap.

I think this year Red Bull do not have the luxury of adding downforce at whim. Will be interesting to see how they manage the situation.

@mahesh
The cooler tempratures mean the medium tyre works better and gives you better lap time. The moment things heat up the softer tyre gets quicker.

How come it is easier to get heat into the medium Tyre in cooler temperature ? I want to know , I thought soft tire will come into operating temp much quicker than medium.

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

Im not sure of the technical reason. Jersey Tom is a poster that should be your first port of call for a technical breakdown of why.

[wunderkind]

Great stuff from Mercedes GP!!

But seems McLaren didn't do any light fuel runs all afternoon. They should be fast in qualifying.

[Neno]

Great stuff from Mercedes GP!!

But seems McLaren didn't do any light fuel runs all afternoon. They should be fast in qualifying.

i repeat in one other topic, both red bull's, hamilton, and both lotus have same program with no empty fuel tank. can anyone realy say that hulkenberg is realy faster then this teams, and then you have schumacher

[myurr]

Long faces at Red Bull apparently. The RB8 is giving away 13Kph to Mercedes and McLaren and the team have taken off more wing to close the gap.

I think this year Red Bull do not have the luxury of adding downforce at whim. Will be interesting to see how they manage the situation.

@mahesh
The cooler tempratures mean the medium tyre works better and gives you better lap time. The moment things heat up the softer tyre gets quicker.

Vettel has been quoted on twitter by Adam Cooper as say he wasn't at all happy with the car this morning. Could be that the relatively poor pace of the upgraded RB8 at the last test is genuine. Will be interesting to see if they revert to the other exhaust setup, or if they were deliberately running what would be illegal settings with that exhaust (such as cold blowing) because they thought the new exhaust layout would compensate.

Or they could be in great shape and will still blow everyone away again

[e30ernest]

Anyone have speedtrap figures for both practice sessions? I'm curious to see how fast the Mercedes is compared to the others with its F-Duct.

[myurr]

http://www.formula1.com/results/season/ ... _trap.html

http://www.formula1.com/results/season/ ... _trap.html

[raymondu999]

Looks to me as though they added wing tbh. McLaren and Red Bull both seem to be gravitating towards that 297kph setup

[myurr]

Looks to me as though they added wing tbh. McLaren and Red Bull both seem to be gravitating towards that 297kph setup

Think that's more that they were doing race sim work so weren't using DRS. That was definitely true of Vettel and I think McLaren were doing the same thing.

Based on last years practice sessions I believe that McLaren were also running more fuel than Red Bull during that race sim work. They tended to practice with race start fuel where Red Bull would use second stint fuel levels.

[e30ernest]

http://www.formula1.com/results/season/ ... _trap.html

http://www.formula1.com/results/season/ ... _trap.html

Thank you!

Interesting straight-line speed from the Renaults.

[myurr]

http://adamcooperf1.com/2012/03/16/seba ... n-the-car/

Sebastian Vettel admits he had a messy first day of the season in Australia, although he was happier with the car by the end of the second session.

While everyone had to adjust their programmes to deal with the rain that affected both sessions, Vettel conceded that RBR was up against it as he wasn’t comfortable with the RB8 initially.

“This morning it wasn’t very good, I wasn’t happy at all in the car,” said Vettel. “This afternoon I think it was a bit better. Obviously with the conditions it was difficult to get a lot of running. It was more or less the same for all of us, but with the little time we had in the afternoon it was quite OK.

“It’s up to us to find the balance and understand the car a little bit more and learn a little bit more about the car in these conditions on this circuit, and hopefully go a lot quicker tomorrow.

“Tomorrow the target is to make it into Q3, and then we go from there.”

Vettel admitted it will be hard to catch up on the lost running in the one hour FP3 session on Saturday.

“You can’t re-invent the wheel, even though you had a messy Friday due to conditions it doesn’t mean that on Saturday you just run the whole hour, you don’t have enough tyres for that, and obviously it’s about preparing for qualifying mostly.

“You can’t do everything in one hour, so as I said the most important thing now is to make a step overnight, learn a bit more about the car – the laps in the end were important to understand a bit more – and then we go from there.”

[MercAMGF1Fans]

Michael's Best sectors combined lap times
Fp1
1:28.235
FP2
1:28.997

[NathanOlder]

Yeah, BBC had 1 run of practice sessions, not SKY, im currectly watching FP1 for the second time!?! who needs sleep!

[Alexgtt]

We can tell nothing from these sessions, as usual, other than what the cars looked like on track. Let's not try to fool ourselves here. It'll still be RB and McL at the front. McL boys have very contented look about them which bodes well. MB "looked" good..............but then again they did in most FP1/2 sessions last year. I do hope they mix it at the front though. Same goes for Renault (OK Lotus but it'll take me some time to get used to that).

Qualy will be facinating. I'm pretty sure RB are lulling most into false security and won't be surprised when they light it up in Q3 with McL. I'm just as interested in the mid field. It'll be a real dogfight end of Q2. So looking forward. =D>