Kovalainen tops Friday Practice

Mc LAren driver Heiki Kobalainen surprisingly tops today’s Free Practice session today while it’s Rosberg who was fastest in first session as usual.

Here are driver comments after Friday practice sessions,

1 . H. Kovalainen – McLaren Mercedes MP4-24
“At the start of the session, the track was very green and it was quite hard to stay on the road – particularly in the opening corners. At first, the car was quite difficult to drive but we worked hard during the session and I think we found a very good balance. The most important thing is that the car is working fine – and the balance is surprisingly good. I think we’ve made another step forward so everybody in the team can be pleased about today. I still think it will be a tough fight to get into the top 10 tomorrow, but we’ll be trying the maximum to improve overnight so that we can join the fight. Overall, it’s very encouraging that we have made another step forward.”

Diffusers declared legal

Formula One’s governing body, the FIA, has declared the controversial double-decker diffuser designs on the Brawn GP, Toyota and Williams cars as legal.
After lengthy deliberations overnight, the judges at the International Court of Appeal hearing in Paris rejected protests against the design from Ferrari, Red Bull Racing, and Renault.
The FIA said in a statement: “The FIA International Court of Appeal has decided to deny the appeals submitted against decisions numbered 16 to 24 taken by the Panel of the Stewards on 26 March at the 2009 Grand Prix of Australia and counting towards the 2009 FIA Formula One World Championship.”

Reshuffle at Ferrari

Apart from the ICA’s decision the Chinese GP must be a turning point for the Scuderia after a bad start to the season. During the days after the return from Malaysia there was an air of retaliation: Montezemolo’s and Domenicali’s calls for each and every person to take responsibility for the parts they play were a great motivation for a group, which knew how to deal with very difficult situations in the past and turning them around.

From a technical and organisational point of view the F60′s development programme received some new stimulus. The goal is to anticipate as much as possible the introduction of new technologies to reduce the performance gap as fast as possible, which, apart from the question of the diffuser, seems to be there. A working party has been set up under the coordination of Aldo Costa, which will follow the development programme at Maranello in close contact with the experience made on the track: a crucial element of this group is Luca Baldisserri. The Scuderia Team Manager will follow the single-seater’s development step by step, while his role at the track will be covered by Chris Dyer.

There will be several new aerodynamic features at Shanghai, which have been tested by Marc Gené last week at the Vairano straight. The front wing will be modified next to the front rims and the deviators. The tyres are the same as in Australia and the main job during the three hours of free practice on Friday will be to understand how the two types will run on the tarmac, which is completely different to the one at Albert Park.

It’s time to wake up for Ferrari

After two back to back races in Melbourne and Sepang, it’s now clear that Ferrari is not the fastest car anymore. In fact they are not even a contender to win the races. But it seems they are still not aware of that. They continue to behave like they are the strongest team as they were before. Yesterday they destroyed Massa’s chances for race, in the first session of Qualifying by not leaving pits for the last time to save tires and today they put extreme wet tires on Raikkonen’s car, while its still bone dry. I cannot believe how Ferrari management came to this point. Even Force India would not do the same in similar conditions. It was clearly a gamble that didn’t work, but usually you gamble when your chances are poor. But it wasn’t the case at that moment. Raikkonen was fifth and he had a good chance of scoring some points or even be at podium with a good strategy call, if you think even Button did four pit stops and still won the race. I could understand if they put the intermediates but it was obvious that the extreme wets cannot survive more than a couple of laps in bone dry conditions. Massa’s case was also a big disappointment. He was on extreme wet tires while everybody was in a hurry to change to intermediates. Only 40 seconds after he changed his tires to intermediates the rain increased and he had to pit again for extreme wets. He would have been in a very strong position if he could wait one more lap. But it was again a wrong call by Ferrari’s pit wall.

This is not the first time that Ferrari doing strategic errors. It’s started to happen just after Ross Brawn and Michael Schumacher left the team. Remember Fuji 2007, Silverstone 2008, Hungary 2007, etc. None of these errors were unavoidable and even small teams do not do this kind of basic errors at any time. But it seems like this is becoming a habit for Ferrari. When they find themselves to chose one of the ways in an unpredictable condition no matter what, they always chose the wrong way. This shouldn’t be the case in a team like Ferrari with very high standards.

Before the Malaysian Grand Prix

After a very surprising start to the 2009 season at Melbourne, we are about to see second race of the season at Malaysia. This season the race will start two hours later than past years. There is a %80 chance of rain during the race and since the race will start late, it may be darker and this may cause visibility problems for the drivers.

At Friday during both practice sessions, teams were very closely matched and the competition was very high as expected. Ferrari seemed better than last race and both drivers managed to do very consistent and fast laps during their long stints. RedBull and Williams seemed to be in a good position too whereas Brawn’s and Toyota’s struggled with their cars balance a bit. One thing very clear is that the softer tires offer better durability and less performance drop during the long stints than Melbourne. For example almost all the fastest lap times came during the long stints (13 – 15 laps) with softer compounds. This was not the case at last weekend’s grand prix. Let’s look at the times deeper and try to analyze the practice lap times;