The first day of the Japanese Grand Prix was, to use Lewis Hamilton’s words, “pretty dull … just grey and wet”.
Okay, that undersells it a little bit. Watching Formula 1 cars tackle the famous Suzuka Circuit in the wet will always be a sight to behold regardless of the lack of stakes.
But it does broadly capture the relevance of the day to the rest of the weekend, which is forecast to be dry and hopefully rather livelier than the grey indifference of wet practice.
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We’ll start Saturday with the tantalising picture of Mercedes being the team to beat at least. The German marque put in a consistently strong showing in the tricky conditions and appeared to have addressed one of its car’s key weaknesses in doing so, generating a small ray of optimism that the form might continue into the rest of the weekend.
Max Verstappen and Red Bull Racing are a step behind, while Ferrari would superficially appear to have some work to do — but then again, it’s never wise to read too much into wet practice times ahead of dry qualifying
But no-one will be more eager to put Friday behind them than Mick Schumacher, whose day ended frustrating early in a surprisingly damaging crash — and one that could prove extremely costly to the team and his career.
IS MERCEDES GOING TO BE ANY GOOD?
George Russell led the way for Mercedes in FP2, 0.235 seconds ahead of Lewis Hamilton.
Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez were almost 0.7 seconds further back.
Seeing two drivers closely matched tends to imply that the most is being wring from the car — which suggests that the pace picture divined from Friday was accurate, at least for the conditions. Albeit we don’t know engine modes and fuel levels, and the time the lap was set and the freshness of the tyres can have massive effects on pace in a way not immediately apparent on the time sheet.
But with these conditions unlikely to be replicated for the rest of the weekend, the times are nonetheless of little value.
“Not a bad afternoon,” he said.
“It’s probably not going to be that representative for this weekend, but it’s definitely good learning for the future,” Russell said. “There’s a chance on Sunday it could be wet, but it looks pretty dry [on Saturday].
“Nevertheless, it’s always nice to end the day top of the time sheets, and we definitely made some improvements from FP1, as we were at the bottom of the time sheets.”
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Hamilton at least sounded optimistic that there might be more on the table for qualifying and the race, hinting that the team had found a small gain in a longstanding problem with generating tyre temperature, and issue that held the team back last week in Singapore, particularly on fresh intermediate tyres.
“I think we’ll be fighting, as always, for the top six positions,” he said. “I hope we can have a shot at something better, but I truly don’t know.
“On the positive side, we were able to switch our tyres on today, so we didn’t look slow. So that’s good.
“There are always things to be taken from [wet sessions] — some of the stuff with set-up, some of the stuff with tyre wear, tyre temperatures and the balance that we’re moving around, trying between sessions.
“There are definitely things to take from it, and there is data on downforce levels and what wing levels everyone else is on.
“We’ll have to wait and see until FP3, that’ll be a crucial session for everybody.”
Cracking its tyre temperature problem could still be valuable even in the dry, with the weather forecast to remain cool and in the low 20s.
It’s clearly too early to say what the competitive order will look like, and Verstappen, who can seal the championship this weekend by winning the race with fastest lap — among other possible permutations — said he was reading nothing into Friday practice.
“In terms of knowing where you are with pace, in the wet it’s a bit tricky,” he said.
“It’s just basically starting from zero tomorrow in the dry, but again, it’s the same for everyone, and I don’t think it will make massive differences throughout the grid.”
A SERIOUSLY COSTLY MISTAKE
When you’re this late into a season and without a contract, the last thing you want to be doing is writing off your car.
Yet Mick Schumacher, who is out of contract at Haas and under serious pressure of being replaced by veteran compatriot Nico Hulkenberg, managed to do exactly that in the lowest stakes practice session of the weekend.
First practice had already finished when he binned his car on his way back to pit lane. He was traversing the esses — which, to be fair, were being inundated with rain at the time — when his car suddenly snapped from under him and pitched towards the inside barrier at Dunlop.
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It wasn’t especially fast, and superficially it appeared to do little more than damage his front wing and front-right assembly.
But having got the car back to the garage, Haas was sufficiently concerned about Schumacher’s chassis that it had switch him to the spare tub, a process that takes so long he couldn’t enter FP2.
A tub costs close to $1 million to build. If it’s found to be irreparable, this will turn out to have been a very costly error indeed, particularly in the cost cap era.
All things considered, it wasn’t a great day.
Team boss Guenther Steiner didn’t mince his words reacting to the crash.
“At some stage you’re a race car driver and you know in spray you cannot see, and there was water before,” he told Autosport. “I mean, I‘m not out there, I’m not telling you how difficult it is.
“This job is not easy, you know. But in the end it was self-inflicted.
“I mean, yeah, there was spray, there was water, but we all know that.”
The German denied the pressure of his position was getting to him.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Pressure is something I have been dealing with for quite some time and I would say even all my life, so I don’t mind that.
“It was more from the fact we had a car ahead that threw up a lot of spray, hence we didn’t see where to put the car.
“I want to do my best, so it doesn’t matter what happened before.
“We take one thing at a time, and that is now FP3 tomorrow and qualifying.”
He’ll need to turn in a big performance in qualifying and the race to salvage this weekend.
WHY WAS THERE SO LITTLE RUNNING ON FRIDAY?
In FP1 more than half the field completed 10 laps or fewer. In FP2 on average each car completed only around 20 laps despite having an extra 30 minutes to play with.
Both those sessions were about one-third down on the amount of running seen in the same respective sessions in 2019.
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The difference of course is that it was raining, and there are two key reasons the rain deterred running.
The first is that there’s no rain forecast for qualifying and only an outside chance of rain materialising for the race. Conditions were therefore unrepresentative of the competitive sessions, meaning there was only so much data that could be gathered by lapping in wet conditions beyond systems checks and some basic set-up trials.
The second is that risk is significantly heightened in the rain around one of the calendar’s most unforgiving circuits, where the walls are close, there are few corners with tarmac run-off and the layout itself is naturally demanding.
With so little to gain but so much to lose from a small mistake turning into a massive crash, the teams and drivers opted against any significant running.
What it will mean is that FP3, which is forecast to be dry, will be unusually busy as the teams attempt to cram all of Friday’s work into a single hour-long session ahead of qualifying.
You can be sure that the European-based simulators will have been hard at work overnight to give their circuit-based colleagues some direction to hit the ground running today.
