25/09/2021
NEWS STORY
With heavy rain hitting Sochi as expected, race director, Michael Masi has laid out the proposed plan for remainder of the weekend.
His comments come in the wake of the postponement of the F2 Sprint Race and the cancellation of the third practice session (FP3) for the Grand Prix.
"As we can see already this morning, the weather's gone up and down like a yoyo," the Australian told the media, "and the intensity of the rain has been increasing, with some thunder also joining us.
"But effectively the procedure per today will be that we will aim to start all sessions, get everything ready from an operational perspective, and then judge the conditions at the time.
"What we're seeing from the forecast side is that we will have rain until about 1330-1430 local time, and then it decreasing in the afternoon.
"The priority from today's perspective is obviously Formula 1 qualifying this afternoon," he admitted. "So Formula 1 will take priority.
"We were fortunate in restructuring the programme to have the first Formula 3 race yesterday, pre-empting the weather that was going to happen this morning, which based on what we saw when we came out to the circuit this morning was absolutely the right decision; it was torrential at the time we would have been having the F3 race. So we did that, and now we'll just sort of look at the day ahead and just take it step by step.
However, other than the rain there is the question of fading light should qualifying be delayed.
"The determining factor this afternoon will be the light," he admitted. "Sunset locally is about 18:15, but with weather conditions like this, obviously light diminishes far earlier, so that will ultimately be our cut-off point.
"If qualifying isn't able to happen today, as we've seen a few times before in the past, then we will re-do a programme and hold qualifying on Sunday morning."
This morning's F2 Sprint Race has already been postponed.