2012 Malaysian Grand Prix - Day 1 analysis

Lewis Hamilton completed a perfect run over the course of Friday Free Practices 1 and 2 today at the Sepang International Circuit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Although the forecast looked threatening, the rain stayed away, giving the teams ample opportunity to run their cars a good number of laps over the two 90 minute sessions.

The majority of teams opted to use the days free practice to trial the two tyre compounds that Pirelli brought to Malaysia; the hard compound, and the medium compound. After a good morning and afternoon, nobody could top Lewis Hamilton and his McLaren MP4-27, who set the pace in both sessions today.

At the end of the day, we look back at the days running order – this time though, instead of getting the drivers’ thoughts on the cars; I wanted to get the thoughts of the different teams personnel.

Coming off a race win, and a third position in Australia, McLaren looked strong throughout the day, with Lewis Hamilton topping the time sheets and Jenson Button just +0.363 behind him in third place as the second free practice session of the day came to a close.

Martin Whitmarsh, Team Principal for McLaren took a positive, yet realistic reflection on the day:

“I think Mercedes AMG look very strong and I don’t think we’ve seen the best of Red Bull Racing just yet – as usual, we expect them to be competitive. However, we weren’t too displeased with today’s running – relative performance doesn’t look too different from what we saw in Melbourne.”

“We feel reasonably competitive – our car seems to respond well to changes and it’s predictable, too. Both Jenson and Lewis found the car to be generally consistent despite the gusty conditions, but Sepang is a much more challenging circuit than Albert Park so we’ll carry on working to improve the balance for qualifying tomorrow.”

“I think we’re in for an exciting championship – a number of teams look extremely competitive and we’re going to have another close race this weekend.”

Mercedes AMG F1 Team had another strong start to a race weekend, with the Mercedes W03 of Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg looking impressive throughout both sessions. With the possibility of a challenge for pole position against the McLaren’s of Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton, Norbert Haug, Vice-President of Mercedes-Benz Motorsport, explained the teams’ concentrations:

“Our focus today was on long runs under race conditions to learn about the best usage of both compounds Pirelli are supplying here. Sepang is a very demanding track in this respect with both heat and humidity contributing to the challenge on this wonderful circuit in the home country of our title partner PETRONAS. We learned a lot today and hopefully created a basis to work from tomorrow and on Sunday.”

With both cars further down the field than they would expect, Red Bull Racing personnel choose to focus their attention on the car this afternoon instead of running interviews. Sebastian Vettel struggled with the rear balance of the car, would only manage tenth overall for the afternoon session, with team-mate Mark Webber doing marginally better, achieving seventh, behind the Ferrari of Fernando Alonso.

Ferrari had another day full of mixed results. Fernando Alonso once again led the way, putting the difficult Ferrari F2012 into sixth position ahead of both Red Bull Racing cars. However, team-mate Felipe Massa, sporting a new chassis on his car, could only manage sixteenth as the days’ practice session came to a close.

Pat Fry, Technical Director for Ferrari, once again spoke on behalf of the struggling outfit:
“Both drivers had a very packed programme today, with slight differences between them, but focussed on the same three main points: a comparison between various aerodynamic configurations, an evaluation of the performance of the two types of tyre (Medium and Hard) that Pirelli have brought here and trying to find the best set-up. We had no major problems and so we were able to complete the entire programme and now we are analysing the data to fine tune the two cars for qualifying and the race.”

“I would say that, at first glance, the situation is not that different to last week, nor could it be any other way, given that the cars are more or less identical to the way they were in Melbourne. We did not see any particular balance problems and the pace over a long run does not seem that bad. Fernando in particular seems to be a bit more comfortable with the car, while we still have work to do to put Felipe in the best conditions possible. The aim for tomorrow is to get both cars into Q3: we are aware that, with our current potential, it will not be easy, but we will give it our all.”

With a strong qualifying and race result from Australia a week ago, Lotus F1 Team looked strong again on track, and the team believes it can be highly competitive at Sepang this weekend.

James Allison, Technical Director at Lotus discussed Raikkonen’s on-going steering issue, as well as Romain’s battle with the Pirelli tyres:

“In some ways it was a somewhat scrappy day after losing a tyre set on Romain’s car in the afternoon due to a cut which meant he lost some laps in the second session. He also had an incorrectly seated wheel nut in the morning. Kimi’s KERS was not playing ball for most of the second session which meant his pace was not fully representative. Those were today’s nuisances, but the positives are that the E20 is working reasonably well. We have good base set-ups for both drivers. Tyre management looks OK despite the hot conditions. The pace of the car on high fuel loads looks promising.”

Sauber F1 Team endured yet another slow start to the weekend, with a gearbox problem effecting the C31 of Kamui Kobayashi and side-lining the driver for much of the afternoon session. The team had to strip back much of the car, but would manage to rebuild it in time for Kobayashi to get a few laps in at the end of the second free practice.

Giampaolo Dall’Ara, Head of Track Engineering for the team, had little to say on the days events:

“This was obviously not an ideal start to the weekend. We have some work ahead of us to get the car’s balance right here. The reliability issue on Kamui’s car didn’t help, but we will keep working hard and do better tomorrow.”

Force India had a somewhat busy Friday as they struggled to get grip from the car on track. The team would focus on setup change and data collection for tomorrow’s final free practice, and qualifying ahead.

Jakob Andreasen, Chief Engineer, told us about the teams focus of the day:

“As always on a Friday, the main priority was to try and get a good understanding of the tyres, which we managed to do with both the medium and hard compound. The driver feedback is encouraging and we demonstrated some good pace over the long runs this afternoon. Other items on the job list included the usual checks to our cooling solutions, especially the engine, as well as some aero comparisons this morning. The only small issue was the braking problem for Paul in the second session, which cost us some track time as we made changes to the brake material; but we understand what happened and will revert to a known solution for the rest of the weekend.”

Toro Rosso were another team to focus on setup and tyre experimentation for the weekend today during free practice one and two. Laurent Mekies, Chief Engineer of the Red Bull Racing sister team, reflected positively on the day:

“Another positive Friday, after the one we had in Melbourne. Today was more straightforward than last week, because the weather conditions were stable with a dry track. We had a few aero elements to evaluate in the morning and then in the afternoon, we worked on set-up. We spent quite a lot time evaluating the two compounds with both drivers in different conditions. Jean-Eric and Daniel did well, completing more than a race distance in both cars, in these hot conditions. Tonight’s task is to make the best use of all the data we have gathered, converting it into more performance for Saturday and Sunday.”

With three drivers at Williams F1 Team taking part in Fridays Free Practices, Mark Gillan, Chief Operations Engineer analysed the day in a concise statement:

“We have had a very constructive day’s running, with all three drivers performing well in hot and humid conditions. We had no issues and completed the whole test programme. We are pleased with our preparation for the race, and we will look to build on this performance throughout the weekend.”

Caterham F1 Team would also spend Friday Free Practice analysing how the Pirelli tyre compounds would take to the circuit with regards to their car.

Mark Smith, Technical Director at Caterham summed up the teams day:

“An interesting day for us and probably every team in the paddock. We knew that tyre management would play a key role over the weekend and it was immediately clear this morning that degradation levels on both tyre compounds are going to be high. The forecasts this morning suggested it might rain this afternoon so we switched the plans and went through some of the afternoon’s workload this morning, looking at how the tyres behaved on different fuel loads on each car. This afternoon we saw improvements on both cars and now have a lot of data to look at to prepare for tomorrow and Sunday.”

John Booth, Team Principal at Marussia Virgin would speak positively to the media of the teams performance today:

“We’ve had another very positive day with the MR01 and this is exactly the start we were looking for from the weekend. We’ve been able to maximise our programme, which means the engineers have plenty of positive homework to do this evening to ensure we keep moving in the right direction. We also evaluated some new rear floor parts this morning with Timo, which he carried through into the afternoon to good effect.”

“Both drivers will now have the benefit of these parts tomorrow. It’s good to see us maintaining the reliability as we can now be confident that the basis of the car is good and turn our minds more towards developing it. It has been a very tough day for the team. The positives of completing a challenging programme with good reliability means the mechanics have been pushed to the max in very trying conditions, but as ever it’s a challenge they have coped with admirably.”

HRT F1 Team, who yet again struggled with both drivers’ cars today, found themselves still outside the 107% time and in need of a full second worth of pace if they are to qualify to race on Sunday.

Toni Cuquerella, Chief Race Engineer for the team, offered us an insight into where the team are currently at.

“We’ve worked very hard these past days to fix the issues we encountered in Australia. Today was a normal Friday and a good day to validate the car’s systems. The priority is for the car to work and we checked that the DRS functioned without problems and resolved the majority of the hydraulic issues.”

“We took another step forward on the track today and improved our lap times, but we’ve still got to improve a lot to make up for the time we lost with respect to our rivals. Tomorrow we will continue to work on optimizing cooling in race distance but, generally, we are satisfied with how the day went.”

Free Practice 3 commences tomorrow, Saturday March 24th 2012 at 13:00 local time, following by Qualifying for the 2012 Formula 1 Petronas Malaysia Grand Prix at 16:00 local time.

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