Japanese GP: Sauber Friday practice notes

Sauber Petronas drivers Felipe Massa and Jacques Villeneuve set their fastest lap times in this morning's practice session for the Japanese Grand Prix, as rain affected this afternoon's.

Jacques Villeneuve:

"The car was difficult to drive this morning, and I had a spin in the 130R corner. It's an easy corner and you don't even have to use the whole width of the road, but it all depends on the bumps. Sometimes they put the front wheels in the air, sometimes the rears."

"It depends what line you take and I was experimenting to try and avoid the bumps. It was a bit strange, what happened. I think in future I'll just go over the bumps and forget about trying to miss them.

"This afternoon we kept the same tyres because of the restrictions and they were vibrating a bit by then, but we had made the car better before the rain came."

Felipe Massa:

"This morning was okay and we were able to do some of our tyre comparison, but I had a lot of oversteer. We changed quite a few things in the set-up for this afternoon and in the limited dry running I did I could tell that the handling was better. After that the rain made things pretty academic."

Willy Rampf (Technical Director):

"The weather this afternoon certainly hasn't helped our tyre choice as we only got part of the picture this morning. We have not been able to do any long runs."

"We must now do some very careful analysis of the lap and sector times before making a decision, but it's the same for everyone. Once the rain came this afternoon we just scrubbed some wet tyres in preparation for what we expect over the remainder of the weekend."

Felipe Massa
Chassis: C24-06
Practice session 1: 1:33.257, 11th
Practice session 2: 1:34.421, 15th

Jacques Villeneuve
Chassis: C24-04
Practice session 1: 1:33.645, 15th
Practice session 2: 1:34.874, 18th

-sauber-