Rain and limited wet weather tyres limit Ferrari's running
A particularly concise press release today, written after three hours of free practice that said nothing or next to nothing, because of the far from summery weather in this corner of England. The F2012s completed just 32 laps, (18 from Alonso and 14 from Massa) and of these, only nine were timed (six for the Spaniard and three for the Brazilian.)
Therefore it is pretty much impossible to draw any sort of conclusion or to make predictions when it comes to the rest of the weekend.
Fernando Alonso: “There’s very little I can say this afternoon, or at least even less than usual for a Friday. We did very few laps because of the rain and the fact that, with the number of sets of rain tyres limited by the regulations, there was no sense in doing more running. Rather, it was better to save tyres, given that the forecast is definitely not encouraging, as it is meant to rain all weekend. In other circumstances, if the rest of the weekend was meant to be dry maybe, then we could have done more running, but in these conditions, as I said, that really wasn’t the case. In the wet, the car seems okay, but it’s practically impossible to say where we are compared to the others. Tomorrow morning, let’s hope we can at least do a few laps in the dry so as to least have a rough idea of the behaviour of the Soft and Hard compounds that Pirelli has brought here. The off track moment towards the end? The car was aquaplaning and it got away from me. A shame about the front wing and now we must see if we can repair it.”
Felipe Massa: “The weather made this a difficult day. It rained all the time and upset our workload therefore we decided therefore to do only a little running to save tyres for tomorrow and Sunday. Obviously this meant we were not able to test the way we wanted, especially when it came to the small updates we have brought to this Grand Prix. I did only three timed laps, so it’s impossible to say anything about how the F2012 is behaving on this track. Tomorrow, regardless of the conditions, we will try and do more laps to be as well prepared as possible for qualifying and the race. We will try and do what we can.”
Pat Fry: “Let’s say that today it would have been more interesting to compare tortellini with tagliatelle – or maybe Parma ham and Jamon Serrano, rather than spending three hours on the pit wall not even managing to complete a dozen timed laps! Joking apart, honestly it wasn’t worth doing much running, because the number of sets of rain tyre per driver is very limited and also because we did not want to risk the cars in such difficult track conditions, with so much surface water. So the real off key moment of the day was Fernando’s off track excursion right on his “in” lap at the end of FP2, which resulted in a broken front wing: now we will try and repair it for the rest of the weekend. We feel very sorry for the many spectators in the grandstands: unfortunately, this was the reality of the situation and we could not do many laps just for the sake of it. We had a few updates, nothing revolutionary, to try but obviously, we could not do much in these conditions. So we tried to do what we could, for example some practice starts, putting off until tomorrow the task of preparing for qualifying and the race. Certainly, if the rain was to continue to play its part, then we will have to be clever in managing the situation as well as possible. We continue to push on the development of the F2012, because now that we have significantly reduced the gap to the best, compared to where we were at the start of the season, it becomes increasingly difficult to make progress: the pace and effectiveness of the updates will be the key to the rest of the season.”
