FORMULA ONE SINGAPORE GRAND PRIX:LEWIS HAMILTON showcased his confident mastery of Singapore's spectacular Marina Bay street circuit yesterday by posting the fastest time during the opening day's practice for formula one's first race to be run at night under floodlights.
The McLaren-Mercedes driver shaved every retaining wall with relentless precision to set a time less than one-tenth of a second faster than Felipe Massa's Ferrari, his main rival in the ongoing battle for the 2008 world championship.
The Brazilian was lucky to escape contact with the barriers close to the circuit edge after skidding up escape roads on a couple of occasions. Hamilton said the circuit was one of the most physically demanding he had experienced, rating it twice as difficult as Monaco where he won earlier this year. "You need to put a lot of work into the car to get a good lap," he said. "I'd say it requires double the energy of Monaco over a single lap. One lap around here is like two laps of Monaco."
While insisting the lights were not a distraction, he added: "I was surprised how bumpy certain sections of the track are. Through certain corners there was lots of bottoming, and when you hit a bump it would throw the car around quite a bit.
"On my first proper run, I managed to find a half-decent line - but the car was still bottoming in places. Throughout P1 [the first session] I was able to get more comfortable with the car. On first impressions, there seems to be quite a lot of grip on the track, so you can brake quite late into the slower corners."
Hamilton's impressive demonstration marked the start of a new era in the sport's history as the most sophisticated racing cars took to the track for this bold new experiment, the intensity of the trackside illumination offering a dramatic, if slightly surreal, counterpoint to the twinkling lights of the skyscrapers on the horizon in the city centre a couple of miles away in the inky blackness.
Fernando Alonso caused something of a surprise by setting the fastest time in the second session with his Renault R28 but he was one-tenth of a second shy of the times set by Hamilton and Massa in the first session.
Toro Rosso's Sebastian Vettel, winner of the previous race at Monza, was 1.7 seconds off the pace and predicted a weekend of struggle for his team. "The track is very difficult and unfortunately the surface is very bumpy which does not make life easy," Vettel said. "As for my car, I'm not happy yet as it feels very loose and I don't think we will have an easy time."
The new circuit was obviously very dusty and slippery from the outset, a fact discovered abruptly by Mark Webber, who skidded into a wall within a few minutes of the start of the first session, removing his Red Bull's right front wheel in the impact. "Crashing on your third lap is probably not the best way to prepare for a race weekend," said the team principal Christian Horner.
Webber's car was repaired in time for him to compete in the second session, although he only took to the track half an hour after it began and ended up setting the 11th-fastest time.
Hamilton's team-mate Heikki Kovalainen finished fourth fastest ahead of Kimi Raikkonen in the other Ferrari while Robert Kubica, third in the championship, wound up sixth in his BMW Sauber.
Jarno Trulli will not forget his first experience of the 3.148-mile track, finishing the day with a reprimand from the race stewards and a €10,000 fine for driving in the wrong direction. The Italian lost control of his Toyota TF108 at the exit of the final left-hander before the pits, skidding to a halt in the middle of the circuit.
Instead of spin-turning his car back into the direction of the circuit, Trulli astonished onlookers by committing the cardinal sin of driving against the traffic in order to gain access to the pit lane.
The stewards were understandably shocked by such a fundamental driving breach on the part of a seasoned competitor and Trulli also received an official reprimand for this lapse in etiquette. Most people felt he was lucky to get away so lightly.
There were concerns voiced about the configuration of the entrance to and exit from the pit lane which may require addressing before today's qualifying session. "We might need to move the pit lane entry a bit - with the white line filtering us in there's going to be quite a speed differential between the guys coming in and the guys still on the track," said Webber.
The problem was highlighted by a close moment when Sebastien Bourdais exited the pit lane just as Nick Heidfeld committed to the first turn on a flying lap, causing the Toro Rosso to cut across the inside run-off and the German driver's BMW Sauber to take to the run-off area on the opposite side of the track.
Guardian Service
