Hockenheim, 18 July – The track temperature at Hockenheim hit an amazing 58 degrees at one point this afternoon, a figure so high that any newcomer to Formula 1 might have assumed the temperatures are posted in Fahrenheit rather than Celsius! The heat was the dominant force in today’s free practice and it’s meant to get even warmer tomorrow, so that tyre management will be the absolute key factor for the rest of the German Grand Prix weekend. To put it in perspective, the track temperature on race day this year in Malaysia, usually regarded as one of the very hottest venues, was a mere 51.
Over the course of today’s three hours of track time, Kimi Raikkonen and Fernando Alonso racked up a total of 112 laps of this 4.574 km track. Apart from paying close attention to the tyres in the heat – the Supersoft appears to lose performance quite quickly, but then “come back” again after a few laps – the team worked as usual on car set-up, concentrating mainly on race preparation. The fact that all the teams agreed not to run the FRIC suspension systems had little impact on the show, with the pecking order much the same as usual.
With a relatively short lap, the times are always close here, so that Kimi in fourth place this afternoon was only half a second off the quickest time, while even Fernando in ninth was within a second of the fastest driver. It goes without saying the fastest man was driving a Mercedes: today it was British GP winner Lewis Hamilton who set the best time ahead of his team-mate Nico Rosberg. Daniel Ricciardo in the Red Bull was third and actually looked as though he could give the Anglo-German team a hard time this weekend. In between Kimi and Fernando, we find Magnussen, Massa, Button and Vettel.