Simulating rather than stimulating sums up our first day of practice for the first race of the season.
While Jaime racked up the laps, completing 18 in the morning and 31 in the afternoon, Sebastien’s STR5 hit trouble during the morning session after just 13 laps and the Swiss had to miss the 90 minutes of track time in the afternoon. However, Seb wasn’t too downhearted as long sessions in our Simulator meant he had a pretty good idea what the new, much longer Sakhir track had in store. However, that’s no substitute for actual driving, so both sides of the garage will be relying on Jaime’s data to decide on the way forward for tomorrow. Alguersuari, who told journalists, “last year I was testing, this year I am racing,” ended the day in sixteenth spot, while naturally, Buemi was at the bottom of the time sheet – a longer one this year, with 23 cars taking part, as Karun Chandok’s Hispania car was not ready for these sessions.
With three new teams and several drivers having played Musical Chairs over the winter, the main game of the day was trying to work out which driver was in which car. Nico Rosberg had the honour of topping the time sheet at the end of the first day of the season, putting his Mercedes ahead of the McLaren of Lewis Hamilton and the second Mercedes driven by that new German driver, Michael Schumacher. Jenson Button started his McLaren career with fourth spot, with Sebastian Vettel fifth for Red Bull Racing. Rounding off the top six and best rookie was Nico Hulkenberg in the Williams.
They are celebrating 60 years of F1 here in Bahrain and there’s a fantastic display of historic cars out in the public area. They will be driven by no less than 18 of the 20 world champions still alive today. The only absentees? Kimi Raikkonen and Nelson Piquet.
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