Friday, 18 July 2014

Temperatures rise to season high

(Pirelli Motorsport Media)

Today saw Free practice 1 and 2 take place in some of he hottest temperature's recorded so far in 2014. The air temperature at the Hockenheimring was between 31 and 32 degrees with the track temperature as high 56 degrees during the second practice session.

The Mercedes duo of Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton made the most of the temperatures as they traded fastest times with Rosberg going quickest this morning using the yellow walled Soft tyre while in the second session Lewis Hamilton set the benchmark time of 1m 18.341s set on the Pirelli red marked Super Soft compound. 

Speaking about today's running Pirelli Motorsport Director Paul Hembery said:

'We’re seeing a time difference of about a second per lap between the two compounds at the moment, but we wouldn’t imagine track evolution to be a particularly key factor here. Instead, the weather is going to be the biggest question mark, with changeable conditions expected from here on. There’s also been a lot of debate about the removal of FRIC suspension but from what we can see so far, it is difficult to say what kind of impact it will have on the tyre behaviour. Despite these very high track temperatures, the two softest compounds in the range have performed as we expected.'

The two compounds used by the teams for this weekend's race performed as expected despite the massive temperature ranges over the course of the day. There is the potential for showers at some stage over the course of the race on Sunday afternoon although it is not expected until some time in the afternoon.

© Ben Johnston 2014


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