They say if you want excitement, just add water.
That phrase isn’t typically directed to practice day, but the beneficial effects of a washed-out FP2 shouldn’t be underestimated.
Second practice is the most important hour of non-competitive track running of a standard F1 weekend. It’s run at the same time of day was qualifying and the race, so teams use it to gauge tyre wear and hone set-up for maximum performance.
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When it’s washed out but rain isn’t expected for either qualifying or the race, it forces teams to think on their feet and even guess their way through setting up the car — as much as any Formula 1 team ever truly guesses anything.
So while rain may not arrive to spice up the race, wet weather hitting the track on Friday afternoon is the next-best thing.
Not that it will perturb Max Verstappen and Red Bull Racing too much, after they demonstrated strongly in the limited dry running we had.
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VERSTAPPEN FOREBODING AFTER DRY PRACTICE
First practice might’ve been all we have to go on for pure pace, but even from that imperfect glimpse it was clear that Max Verstappen and Red Bull Racing are in the box seat, as very much expected.
Verstappen was comfortably fastest in FP1, with an approximately half-second advantage over Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso and Charles Leclerc.
Sergio Perez was also around 0.5 second adrift, though he had only one short run on softs, when a mistake on the brakes through the tricky turn 3-4 chicane cost him all his time.
In other words the chasing pack looks closely matched, as was the case in the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, but no-one is coming close to laying a glove on Red Bull Racing.
The RB19’s advantage is mostly down the straights, where it’s killing the opposition, but it’s not exclusively down to power.
A look at the telemetry paints a picture greyer than the Melbourne skies that washed out FP2.
Mercedes, Aston Martin and Mercedes are marginally quicker through most of the corners most of the time, but emphasis is on marginal. There’s no sequence of corners through which the deficit decreases in any meaningful way, and down the following straight Verstappen piles on more pain.
It speaks to the efficiency of the car’s aerodynamics that it can be rocket-quick down the straights without sacrificing too much cornering performance.
Red Bull Racing’s super-effective DRS — first noted by Lewis Hamilton last time out — is also evident in Melbourne’s four activation zones, where the flap flips open the car speeds away from the competition at even great rate of knots. At the end of the last DRS zone the car was 7 kilometres per hour quicker than the Mercedes and Aston Martin and 14 kilometres per hour quicker than the Ferrari.
The only potential chink in the armour is that without FP2, there was no meaningful long-run simulation conducted, meaning race pace remains unknown. But it’ll have to take a significant twist to deprive Red Bull Racing of what looks like a might inherent pace advantage.
TRACK CONDITIONS ARE VOLATILE — BUT RAIN SHOULD STAY AWAY
FP1 was unusually error-prone, with most drivers finding themselves on the grass or in the gravel at one point or another despite the track being dry and clean after a full day of support racing on Thursday and several other sessions earlier on Friday.
It was almost as if Verstappen’s early run on softs was so impressive that it convinced the rest of the field that they too could access that kind of pace if only they pushed a little harder.
Whatever the case, there appeared to be a fundamental mismatch between how much grip the drivers expected and how much the track and tyres actually yielded.
Despite the brilliant sunshine early in the day, the weather has been cool all day. The air temperature was around only 18°C and the track barely cracked 30°C.
It meant even the soft tyre needed time to brought up to temperature, never mind the harder compounds. That in part explains why so many drivers found themselves slipping and sliding around the course.
But there’s also the characteristics of the track itself.
As a street circuit it starts very green and lacking grip. The surface, as laid last year, is also less abrasive than previously, meaning it takes longer to grip up.
But when the rubber does start getting laid into the road, it ramps up considerably.
We got a sense of that in the brief few minutes of dry running in FP2, when Fernando Alonso used the medium tyre to come close to beating Verstappen’s best lap from FP1, which was set on softs.
Considering Alonso’s deficit in FP1 as well as the estimated half-second gap in the compounds, that’s a considerable improvement from track conditions alone.
But rain on Saturday afternoon has washed a lot of that rubber away, resetting the track to zero and forcing that process to start again.
Not only will that make for a fraught FP3 and qualifying, but it will also force teams to guess tomorrow afternoon, when they have to lock in their set-ups, how much grip the track will have on race day.
Red Bull Racing lost last year’s race because of a poor prediction about track grip. The scope to make a race-ruining mistake is certainly high.
Rain is forecast not to reappear for the rest of the weekend and is especially unlikely for the race on Sunday.
MORE ENGINE CHANGES FOR FERRARI
In the latest chapter of Ferrari’s ongoing engine reliability dramas, both customer teams — Alfa Romeo and Haas — have cracked open their second of three internal combustion engines for both drivers, bringing them all a step closer to a potential grid penalty.
In Bahrain the team was plunged into a fresh reliability crisis when Charles Leclerc’s engine unexpectedly expired, with the problem being traced back to electronic control unit. Leclerc has already taken a grid penalty for using three ECUs this year.
Both Ferrari works drivers took their second internal combustion engines at the previous race as a precaution following Leclerc’s failure. That the customer teams would do likewise so early in the campaign — and despite Albert Park not being considered a power-sensitive circuit — suggests concerns may still linger that all is not well in the Italian power unit.
PIRELLI’S TYRE CHANGE COULD OPEN UP STRATEGIC VARIATION
Strategy permutations remain speculative so early in the weekend, especially given FP2, which is used to simulate race pace, was effectively washed out, but there’s optimism the Australian Grand Prix could see some more variety in tactics than last year’s straightforward one-stop race on the hard and medium tyres.
In 2022 Pirelli brought the C2 (hard) and C3 (medium) tyres as the racing compounds but skipped a step and went for the C5 tyre as the soft. While it was obviously popular for qualifying, it was too delicate to be used seriously in the race.
This year the tyre supplier has reverted to the standard C2-C3-C4 tyre selection, which motorsport boss Mario Isola thinks will open up options in the race based on observations from FP1.
“The soft is a different compound compared to last year because last year the C5 was a bit too soft,” he said. “Nobody was going to use it during the race.
“We want to encourage different strategies possibly with a mix of one and two stops but also using all the different compounds.
“The soft in FP1 … is working quite well, so I’m confident that we can have different strategies on Sunday. I don‘t know if one or two stops yet.”
The soft might be a particularly attractive tyre if warm-up remains as slow as it looked on Friday — Verstappen’s quickest FP1 time came on the 10th lap on that set of softs, which is highly unusual for what should be the most delicate rubber.
But if warm-up is worse for the harder compounds, it will dissuade teams from making more than one stop given the first few laps on fresh rubber would cost them time as they came up to temperature.
It’s all academic, however, with the track conditions unpredictable and warmer weather expected on Sunday.
