25/09/2015
NEWS STORY
Wet weather in Suzuka saw Sahara Force India complete a reduced free practice programme ahead of Sunday's Japanese Grand Prix.
Nico Hulkenberg: "We didn't learn a huge amount today, although we did complete a couple of useful runs on the intermediate tyres this afternoon. Of course, if it's dry on Saturday and Sunday, the work we've done today is not going to be particularly useful. It's the same situation for everybody because we are all missing the dry tyre information we need to help us prepare for the weekend. However, we have run on the hard and medium compounds at other races and we've already got a good understanding of those tyres. If the weather does improve tomorrow we will probably run a bit more than usual in FP3 to try and make up for the lack of mileage today."
Sergio Perez: "It was wet all day and so we didn't do a lot of laps, which means we are going into the weekend with quite a few question marks. We need to try and answer them tomorrow in final practice, but it's the same situation for everybody and we just have to make the best of it. At the moment we expect it to be dry tomorrow, but in Japan you never know for sure. If the rain does come back I think we've done enough learning today to have a good direction for our wet weather set-up."
Robert Fernley, Deputy Team Principal: "Conditions like today's make for difficult choices. The forecast for the rest of the weekend should be dry, but the weather in Suzuka is notoriously unpredictable, so we used the two sessions to do some work on the intermediate and wet tyres. This is a high tyre-energy circuit so it was important we could get information on those two compounds, but at the same time we had to limit our running to preserve enough sets to account for the possibility of a wet qualifying or race. A wet Friday also means we will have to reassess our priorities for the final session tomorrow morning. Our original programme for today included work on some test items and optimisation of our qualifying and race set-ups, but the latter will take priority tomorrow as we try and learn as much from the limited track time we have available."
Check out our Friday gallery, here.