Force India prepared for wet weather, says Perez

With persistent rain falling, teams and drivers had no representative dry running as Toro Rosso's Carlos Sainz and Red Bull's Daniil Kvyat respectively topped the two sessions on Friday.

Both Perez and teammate Nico Hulkenberg completed 26 laps together across the two sessions, using the Pirelli wet and intermediate tyres.

Hulkenberg finished 11th, three places ahead of Perez, in the latter session, while in the first session neither of the drivers set a representative time.

While the remainder of the weekend is predicted to be dry, the Mexican suggested that the team is well prepared for a wet qualifying and race.

Being cautious about Japan's changing weather, Perez said: "If the rain comes back, I think we’ve done enough learning today to have a good direction for our wet weather set-up."

Deputy team principal Bob Fernley echoed his driver's sentiments: "The weather in Suzuka is notoriously unpredictable, so we used the two sessions to do some work on the intermediate and wet tyres."

The huge number of fans in the stands were frustrated with the lack of running, but Fernley said that they couldn't risk running more, so as to save tyres, should it rain tomorrow and Sunday.

With no dry data available, the focus shifts to FP3 and if the weather improves, teams will have an awful lot of work at hand to prepare for qualifying and race.

"A wet Friday means we will now have to reassess our priorities for the final session tomorrow morning," Fernley said.

"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."