25/09/2015
NEWS STORY
Nico finished in P3 and P2 respectively in the two Friday Practice sessions, with Lewis P5 and P3. Light rain throughout the day limited running to just 22 laps (Nico) and 14 (Lewis). Both cars ran the wet tyre in P1, the wet and intermediate compound in P2.
Nico Rosberg: The car felt good in the wet today, we were able to do some laps and find some good settings for wet conditions. But it's impossible to judge about the real performance level of the field in those conditions. We have to learn a lot in FP3 tomorrow morning because it should be dry Saturday and Sunday, but you never know in Japan.
Lewis Hamilton: Today hasn't been a good day for us in the paddock and for the fans that were sitting there all day in the rain waiting to see the cars. There is nothing we really learned today so everything needs to be done tomorrow. It is slippery, wet and there was also aquaplaning; not the most exciting conditions. We didn't want to take too many risks today, as there is no point in damaging the car or the gearbox. It wasn't a very productive day overall. I hope it is dry tomorrow, but we are prepared for all conditions.
Paddy Lowe, Executive Director (Technical): The weather has been terrible all day and a great shame for the fans as we haven't done a lot of running today. We only ran the extreme wet and intermediate tyres, so we haven't done any of our race preparation on the dry tyre. We're hoping the rest of the weekend will be dry, so we'll need to do a lot of testing during FP3 to prepare for qualifying and the race. We managed to complete some practice starts in both sessions and some running on both tyres to look at the balance of the car in the wet conditions. We've been running Nico's engine that was contaminated in Monza, which seems to be working fine so far; a good discovery for the remainder of the season.
Check out our Friday gallery, here.