23.09.2011
The first two Free Practice sessions for the Singapore Grand Prix got underway today and Marussia Virgin Racing’s Timo Glock and Jérôme D’Ambrosio completed their first laps of the weekend at the only night race on the calendar. The first session started with a 30-minute delay as some of the temporary kerbing at turns 3 and 14 had come loose. Once repaired, the session got underway at 1900hrs, with the stewards deciding to shorten the session to one hour. Down by 30 minutes on the clock, it was necessary for the team to spend as much time as possible on track. Jérôme was one of the first out and Timo followed him soon after. With 31 minutes remaining, the session was red-flagged due to a brake fire on Kovalainen’s car and all drivers were confined to the garage. Timo was already back, having suffered a puncture after being hit by Webber. Another red flag was deployed with only eight minutes to go, as more kerbing came loose, this time at turns 7 and 8. When the session restarted, Jérôme went out on track again, completing a total of 13 laps, while Timo stayed in to save tyres after having completed only six laps. The second Free Practice session was all about making up for lost time. With an air temperature of 30°C and a track temperature of 31°C, this was a more useful session, with Timo and Jérôme completing 25 laps each.
Timo Glock, Race Driver #24
“Not a great first practice session. It was a pretty short one due to the problems on the track and then the incident with Webber, which in the end made us lose a lot of time. The rear left tyre was punctured and I didn’t run again as we didn’t want to waste a set of tyres in FP1. FP2 wasn’t great but it was slightly better. We did some variations in terms of set-up and the direction is not bad, but it’s still difficult on a long run as we suffer on the rear tyres. We have to look into it and try to fine-tune the car for tomorrow.”
John Booth, Team Principal
“At this type of circuit you always hope that your practice sessions are going to go exactly to plan in order to maximise track time and enable the drivers and engineers to arrive at the optimum set-up. So it’s fair to say that it’s been more than a little frustrating. Whilst we’ve collected some good data on higher fuel runs for the tyres with both drivers, what we ultimately missed out on with both cars was the low-fuel Supersoft run. Unfortunately both drivers had started their laps when the yellow flags came out for Buemi. We thought the Yellow would be out for some time given the position of his car so we aborted both cars’ runs and in doing so we effectively missed the sweet spot of the tyre life when we went back out. We’ve spent quite a bit of the day stepping through some combinations on the upgrade package but mainly to help with the engine cooling demands of this circuit. We now look forward to a smooth FP3 tomorrow and getting some better qualifying runs completed.”
Credit: Timo Glock (www.timoglock.de)
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