Ferrari Quick in Practice, but Mercedes Are Still the Chinese GP Favourites

By
at Internationaled.org

Published: April 15, 2016

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Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen and Sebastian Vettel set the two fastest laps during the second free practice session for the Formula One Chinese Grand Prix.

Raikkonen's lap of one minute, 36.896 seconds was 0.109 seconds quicker than Vettel's best effort and—more importantly—0.237 seconds ahead of Nico Rosberg in the top Mercedes car.

Ferrari's quick laps around the Shanghai International Circuit led Sky Sports commentator David Croft to question during the broadcast whether Mercedes' streak of four straight poles in China was under threat.

But wasn't it just two weeks ago in Bahrain that we got excited by Ferrari's pace in FP3, when Vettel was nearly half-a-second quicker than Rosberg and his team-mate, Lewis Hamilton? And what happened as soon as qualifying began and the lap times actually counted?

Mercedes flipped a switch (or pressed a button) and suddenly Hamilton and Rosberg were a half-second ahead of the Ferraris.

Asked in the FIA press conference why the Mercs were suddenly so quick, Vettel responded, "I don’t know, you should ask them!"

Clearly, Mercedes have not been pushing their cars to the limit during free practice, confident in their pace when they need it. The team employed a similar strategy throughout winter testing, focusing on reliability rather than outright speed.



After Friday's running in Shanghai, Raikkonen acknowledged Ferrari's strength on the super-soft tyres (the softest compound available), but said, per ESPN F1's Nate Saunders, "For whatever reason we've been quite struggling apart from the super-soft tyre. Our car is nice but it's just the other tyres are very difficult to get any grip from."

That was the polite version of his radio message while on the soft tyres, which was played on the broadcast, where he asked the team, "Do you really want that I keep going, because it's just absolute [censored]?"

Article Source: Bleacher Report - Formula 1

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