The Red Bull Racing cars of Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber are showing excellent pace in practice ahead of today’s Qualifying and tomorrow’s Formula 1 Spanish Grand Prix, in Barcelona.
In yesterday’s second practice session, Vettel and Webber were once again first and second fastest, with third placed man Michael Schumacher an age – by Formula 1 terms – back, down 0.8 seconds on Webber in third.
The story of the season so far has been Red Bull’s tremendous pace in fine conditions, so surely McLaren and the rest of the pack will be hoping for more rain in Spain as we saw on Thursday: their victories have come when the weather has changed.
We have seen, however, that practice on Friday does not equal race success, so we will need to wait until today’s practice completes and, more importantly, for this afternoon’s qualifying session to have any idea whether the Red Bull men can make up the front row of the grid yet again.
If the patterns emerging this season continue, expect McLaren to improve upon practice in qualifying, and improve again on Sunday, while Red Bull will tend towards the opposite.