Interlagos, 7 November – The fact that, contrary to expectations from earlier in the week, it remained dry throughout both of today’s free practice sessions at the tricky Jose Carlos Pace circuit was a real bonus for all the teams. Because while no rain fell, there were plenty of other factors for the drivers and engineers to juggle with today. To start with, the entire 4.309 kilometres of the second shortest venue on the calendar has been entirely resurfaced. It looks as though it has been given a new lick of black paint. The shiny dark heat-absorbing colour would certainly have contributed to the fact that, in the second session, track temp hit 57 degrees, around 20 degrees higher than in the morning.
Grip was good right from the start and the track evolved throughout the day. However, there were already signs of graining and blistering, which made it even more complicated as a couple of red flags in FP2 meant most people never got the long run data they’d been hoping for on either the Soft or the Medium tyre. One of those red flags was caused by Fernando Alonso’s F14 T catching fire in spectacular fashion as the power unit let go with 20 minutes remaining. At this stage of the season, everyone is running old engine units on the Friday to save the fresher ones for the competitive part of the weekend. So it was a distraction, but not too costly in terms of time lost and of course, no penalties are incurred on a Friday. As for Kimi, he reckons the F14 T is coming round to the way he likes it.
If it’s dry in tomorrow’s final hour of free practice, then all teams will want to check out their long run tyre performance, but if it rains, then that’s a completely different ball game, on a track where water drainage has usually been a problem. Wet or dry, tomorrow afternoon’s qualifying could be very exciting as, like at all the shorter tracks on the calendar, traffic, especially in Q1 can be a problem.