Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsRed Bull Racing

Wet Friday of little value to time-topping Kvyat

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Red Bull's Daniil Kvyat was happy with his car's handling on Friday at Suzuka but admitted topping the day's overall timesheets 'had no value' in such conditions.

"Today means nothing, to be honest," said Kvyat after finishing with the best lap of anyone in the two rain-hit 90-minute practice sessions in Japan.

"It wouldn’t be too bad if it was going to rain, but I don’t think it will be weather like this the whole weekend," he said. "Friday has no value at all so it does not matter."

Kvyat's best lap of the day clocked in at 1:48.277s in Free Practice 2, putting him a slender 0.023s ahead of Mercedes Nico Rosberg whose team mate Lewis Hamilton was over half a second further back as a result of the fluctuating conditions in the afternoon.

While the heavy rain and soaking track certainly made it difficult to work out who was realistically performing best this weekend, Kvyat could at least take satisfaction that the dismal weather conditions hadn't thrown up any problems with the handling of his car so far.

"Everything seemed to be okay. There were no particular issues on the car. I have been quite happy.

"Quite slippery, especially when there was more drizzle coming, there was always more and more aquaplaning tendencies and it was more tricky to keep the car on the track.

"It is quite a narrow track as well so there were a few corners and places where it was quite easy to make a mistake."

Several drivers had minor run-offs during the two sessions, but there were no serious incidents and no harm was done to any of the cars despite the tricky conditions that could easily have seen one or more cars making contact with a barrier.

Kvyat edges Rosberg in FP2 at wet Suzuka

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.