Interlagos, 22November - While some on-line weather sites were still showing glorious sunshine for Interlagos today, the more experienced hands in its cramped and crowded paddock all made sure they went home with their rain jackets last night.
Sure enough, Friday dawned damp and cooler than the past couple of days and the track surface never dried enough for any slick tyre work at all. Just as in Spa-Francorchamps, the rain is almost an essential ingredient of the Brazilian GP weekend and all the teams know how to deal with it. The only difficulty is that there is not an endless supply of rain tyres to play with and each driver gets just three sets of the Extreme Wets, for use in heavy rain, to last the entire weekend. With more wet weather almost inevitable, the need to do plenty of laps, to gather data for the engineers and confidence in the track for the drivers has to be tempered with the need to save the Extremes, if they are needed for the critical qualifying session tomorrow afternoon and of course the final race of the season.
That’s why Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa completed a mere 47 laps, 23 for the former and one more for the latter, of the tiny track, which although not the shortest, that honour going to Monaco, does produce the fastest lap of the season in dry conditions. Even in the rain, there was a decent crowd today and they no doubt enjoyed seeing Felipe sporting a special red helmet decorated with all the landmark numbers from his Ferrari career, as well as a race suit the design of which reflected his time with the team as well as his nationality. The Brazilian ended the day seventh fastest, four places ahead of his Spanish team-mate on the time sheet.
Nico Rosberg was quickest for Mercedes – in both sessions in fact – while Sebastian Vettel and Red Bull team-mate Mark Webber were second and third in the afternoon.