Rain during the opening day of running for the 2016 Formula One season played havoc with every teams’ plans during practice for the Australian Grand Prix.
Jenson Button completed the most laps in FP1 at a mere 16, whilst only 15 drivers set a lap time in the second practice session.
For Toro Rosso, their problems were exasperated by Carlos Sainz suffering mechanical issues in the first practice session. The Spaniard will be hoping that these do not translate into a repeat of his 2015 season, which was marred by technical trouble from their then Renault power unit.
Speaking after completing just nineteen laps in today’s three hours, Sainz said “[It’s] Not the easiest of starts to the weekend.
“During this morning’s FP1 we faced a few issues that limited our running, but fortunately we didn’t miss much because the track was wet for most of the session. The weather has been a bit annoying throughout the day, but at least FP2 was much better in terms of reliability.”
His teammate Max Verstappen was also frustrated by the weather in Melbourne, which is the reason why he didn’t leave the pits at all in second practice. “It was a bit of a tricky day today.
“The weather conditions were constantly changing… when we went out on slick tyres it would start to rain and when we went out on intermediates, the track would be drying up.”
Although Friday’s running may not have been of much use to the drivers, it was to the team. Phil Charles, Toro Rosso’s Chief Race Engineer, revealed that running on both Intermediate and slick tyres gave the engineers some aero data to analyse.
“[We managed] some runs on inters and a couple of short blasts on dry tyres in between the showers. We managed to collect some useful aero data during these runs and we will spend some time tonight going through it in detail.”
Charles also shared the drivers’ disappointment at the weather conditions. “I had been looking forward to this day for a while as I expected it would be the first time this year where we would really start to learn where we rank as it is so difficult to judge in winter testing. Unfortunately the famous four-seasons-in-a-day Melbourne weather meant that we didn’t really get to fill in all of those question marks in either session.”
