European GP - Another street circuit, another good Friday
Valencia, 24 June - A solid opening day for Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro at the European Grand Prix in Valencia. At the end of the 180 minutes of track time, Fernando Alonso set the fastest lap around the 5.419 kilometres of this challenging street circuit, the Spaniard being the only man to break the 1m 38s barrier during free practice. In total, at his second home race meeting after the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona, Fernando completed 57 laps, which equates exactly to Sunday’s race distance.
In the other 150º Italia, Felipe Massa did two laps less, ending the day fifth fastest. In between the two Ferrari men on the time sheet were three world champions: Lewis Hamilton was second for McLaren, with series leader Sebastian Vettel third in the Red Bull. Fourth quickest was the Mercedes of Michael Schumacher while Jenson Button completed the top six. Interestingly enough, Fernando was also quickest in FP2 last year and it’s a sign of how the sport can change from one year to the next, in that his best lap today (1m37.968) was much quicker than last year’s 1m39.283.
The street circuit is an interesting mix, with the priority in terms of car set up being to make it work in the slower sections, as the fast final one, although important has fewer corners. Therefore, it was another very busy opening day of a Grand Prix weekend, as the Scuderia worked on fine tuning every aspect of the car’s performance aimed at tomorrow afternoon’s qualifying and Sunday’s race, as well as working on the car’s on-going development, which involves testing new solutions. Throw into the mix a new Pirelli tyre, the Medium compound which makes its race weekend debut here as the Prime choice and you have the recipe for very busy scenes and plenty of activity in the garage.
As it says at the top of this article, today is the 24th June, which makes it a special day for motor sport fans with a sense of history. Today would have been Juan Manuel Fangio’s one hundredth birthday. The great Argentine driver, who died in 1995 took five world titles and one of them, in 1956, came at the wheel of a Ferrari.
Credit: Ferrari S.p.A. (www.ferrari.com)
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