Practice 2: 9th and 12th.


By Sam Cooper
April 6 2007

The Vodafone McLaren Mercedes team finished the second practice session very disappointingly as their two drivers finish 9th and 12th.

Red flags were brought out by Spyker driver Christian Albers, a tyre exploded which caused the Dutchman to spin out at turn 2. He is unhurt we are glad to announce.

We can report that McLaren were focusing on longer runs in the second session, which explains why they weren’t as fast as we were expecting them to be.

Fernando Alonso

"The team tested here last week when most of the set-up was done so we had a good basis for today’s practice. There is now some more data added to the file which we will look at overnight, but everything went as expected. I spent some time just getting used to Sepang again as I wasn’t testing last week, but there were no surprises, and I really enjoy this track.”

Lewis Hamilton

"This is my first Malaysian Grand Prix, but I got to know the circuit well during last week’s test. The heat and humidity are as I expected and have trained for. The practice today was pretty straight forward, and we made further steps. The circuit conditions are constantly changing which makes it challenging to find the right balance. I’m looking forward to qualifying tomorrow.”

Ron Dennis

"A solid start to our Malaysian Grand Prix where we continued the work from last week’s Sepang test. Today the main focus was on tyre evaluation on a circuit where traditionally tyres have very high levels of degradation. This impacted significantly on our lap times. We look forward to qualifying tomorrow.”

Norbert Haug

"This circuit with high temperatures inside and outside of the cars is really very challenging and especially so for the tyres. We did a lot of laps and learned for tomorrow when we aim to get an order like in practice one rather than in practice two.”

Complete times will be shown below.

Pos.

Driver

Team

Time

Laps

1

Felipe Massa

Ferrari

1:35.780

34

2

Giancarlo Fisichella

Renault

1:35.910

36

3

Hekki Kovalainen

Renault

1:36.106

37

4

Kimi Räikkönen

Ferrari

1:36.160

33

5

Nico Rosberg

Williams

1:36.523

31

6

Alexander Wurz

Williams

1:36.621

21

7

Robert Kubica

BMW

1:36.717

18

8

Ralf Schumacher

Toyota

1:36.760

28

9

Lewis Hamilton

McLaren

1:36.797

30

10

Nick Heidfeld

BMW

1:36.862

25

11

Mark Webber

Red Bull

1:36.906

18

12

Fernando Alonso

McLaren

1:37.041

26

13

David Coulthard

Red Bull

1:37.203

25

14

Takuma Sato

Super Aguri

1:37.282

30

15

Jenson Button

Honda

1:37.578

29

16

Jarno Trulli

Toyota

1:37.712

34

17

Vitantonio Liuzzi

Scuderia Toro Rosso

1:37.855

26

18

Anthony  Davidson

Super Aguri

1:38.334

27

19

Adrian Sutil

Spyker F1

1:38.419

28

20

Scott Speed

Scuderia Toro Rosso

1:38.650

20

21

Rubens Barrichello

Honda

1:38.713

20

22

Christian Albers

Spyker F1

1:39.807

23