The unusual sprint race weekend schedule was challenging already for teams and drivers, with only a single hour of practice available before having to run flat out in qualifying. But the wet start to the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix has only made matters far more difficult.
From the moment the cars ventured out onto the track at the start of Q1, parc ferme rules came into effect for the following two-and-a-half days of the event, meaning there is no opportunity to add downforce, remove it, or change the specification of any of the parts on the teams’ machines. For better or worse, all 20 drivers are now locked in to their set-ups for the rest of the weekend without having had any truly representative running on dry tyres.
That makes judging the strengths of the various teams after Friday’s running all the more difficult – especially given that both Q2 and Q3 were heavily disrupted by red flags, denying the majority of the field the opportunity to improve their times. Their grid positions were strongly influenced by the positions they happened to be in when the sessions were stopped.
Usually, the second practice session on a Saturday morning during sprint weekends is the least meaningful session of the weekend, with teams only able to correlate data from Friday or test out various tyre compounds over longer runs. But second practice this weekend will likely be a busy affair, as teams scramble to gather as much meaningful data on the three dry compounds before the two races round off the weekend.
What Friday did offer, however, is an insight into how the new 18-inch wet Pirelli tyres behave and how the ten teams’ cars for 2022 handle wet conditions. Based on the data they gathered today, Pirelli’s Mario Isola was happy with how the tyre supplier’s new wet compounds handled their first true run out in 2022.
Verstappen pipped Leclerc to sprint race pole“This was the first real test for us of the new 18-inch wet and intermediate tyres, which have never been…