An interesting thing happened during today’s two practice sessions: We had a hint of the old order of things as, despite some continuing good results for Brawn and Williams, the Ferraris and McLarens were looking a lot better than probably since the beginning of the season. The Renaults were looking O.K., but forget the BMW Saubers. Mario Theissen put it down to Monaco being such an atypical track. But that sounded like a good way to fend off criticism while the team tries to put together something better for later in the weekend. Kubica finished dead last in the second session with a blown engine.
Willy Rampf, the head of engineering for BMW Sauber, was a little more blunt: “This was a disappointing practice day. The car’s performance is a long way behind what we were expecting,” he said.
The blown engine is a Friday engine so no penalty will be given.
Elsewhere, I practiced my usual fun game of watching how the various drivers do from a different point of view. The Monaco street circuit is supposed to separate the great drivers from the rest. I always keep a close watch on the difference between teammates, and I like to see if there is a driver in a usually much weaker car who suddenly does a great lap time.
On Wednesday, Sebastien Bourdais attributed what makes the difference in Monaco more to whether or not a driver likes street circuits, and not so much about whether one has more pure talent than the other. Bourdais was faster than Buemi just about all day throughout both sessions … until Buemi as usual just clipped a slightly faster time on him by the end of each session.
Elsewhere, with that same theory in mind, there were few surprises: Nico Rosberg in his Williams set the fastest time of the day in 1 minute 15.2 seconds, while Lewis Hamilton was just .2 behind him in the McLaren, Rubens Barrichello - interestingly - was third fastest and just .1 faster than Jenson Button. Felipe Massa was second fastest in the morning session in his Ferrari and made it to fifth fastest of the afternoon session. Just about everywhere, the teammate you would expect to be fastest was fastest. Aside from the BMW Sauber cars, the other sad story was Toyota, with Jarno Trulli finishing 14th fastest and Timo Glock 18th fastest.
Whether or not the return to power of McLaren and Ferrari is going to last beyond the practice sessions we will only know at qualifying. I tend to think we may be seeing the effect of the better drivers making up for what their car lacks - as is often the case in Monaco.
Comente