This weekend, there's a change of two drivers: Christian Kline for Sakon Yamamoto (Hispania) and Nick Heidfeld for Pedro De La Rosa (Sauber). Heidfeld has previously raced in F1 – you may recognise the name – and is a permanent replacement. Kline, however, is only a temporary replacement as it appears Yamamoto has food poisoning. Once again, Chandhok is not racing, although it was Sir Jackie Stewart up in the BBC commentary box for practice 1.
Singapore presents a good opportunity for the new teams. With the interesting conditions – and the chance of a safety car – if one team gets twelfth position they can reach 10th in the championship, which is worth a lot of money. And if they get points... even better!
The first practise session started out wet, although it wasn't raining, and the drivers were on intermediates. But towards the end, when the track finally got dry enough – there was no sun to dry the track since Singapore's a night race – the slicks had the drivers going faster. Still, it is going to be a long race, completely unlike Monza (Italy) which is one of the fastest Grand Prix out there. The commentators are predicting a long race - maybe even 2 hours rather than 61 laps if we get a couple of safety cars.
After P1, Webber was the fastest, but second was Schumacher, then Sutil, Vettel and Alguersuari. Only the two Red Bulls are drivers we'd expect to be going quick – Schumacher has never raced here before, and the Force Indias have varied performance. As for Alguersuari, at times this year he's been in danger of going out in the first round of qualifying (and even has, at some races). So it was interesting to look forward to practice two, and see if the traditionally faster cars (Ferrari and MacLaren) can get ahead of these surprises. Otherwise, we're bound to see some unusual results this weekend.
Practice 2 had even faster times as the track was even drier. Karun Chandhok was up with the BBC boys. It was, for the most part, a normal session, although Vettel got well ahead of the practice 2 time he had set last year at Singapore, on the 'slower', harder tyre.
Adrian Sutil got some air time as he took the chicane badly, launching his car in the air and hitting it down rather badly so that his front left wheel was snapped off, causing him to stop just before half-way through P2. As for poor old Fernando Alonso, he turned off the track to a run-off area because he was not quite going to make a corner, tried to reverse his car out onto the track to get back into the session, and then stalled. He had to get out of his car on the track, then began pushing it back by himself before the marshals arrived to take over – bad form marshals! This is especially bad because he had had the fastest time for sector 1, and a personal best for sector 2 on the track.
Despite all of that, however, he did set the fourth-fastest time. The five fastest in practice 2 were the five championship leaders.
Tomorrow: Qualifying!
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