A Difficult Final Practice For The Team

By BMW Sauber F1 Team
June 9 2007

Due to oil on the track, the third free practice session for the Canadian GP was red-flagged for nearly 20 minutes, thus preventing the BMW Sauber F1 Team from completing its scheduled programme. Furthermore, Nick Heidfeld's BMW Sauber F1.07 caught fire on the out lap of his second stint.

For the first 20 minutes of the session, there was hardly any action as a car in one of the support races had dropped oil on the circuit and a lot of binding agent had been placed on the track to solve the problem.

Robert Kubica - who completed two stints comprising twelve laps- went out for his first five-lap stint at 10.22hrs local time (15.22hrs BST) on the soft compound and improved lap by lap to 1:18.135 minutes, the third fastest lap at this point in time.

Ten minutes later, at 10.33hrs local time, Nick was just about to go out for his first stint when Renault's Heikki Kovalainen suffered an engine failure on the approach to the final turn and consequently dumped oil on the track. As a result, the session had to be red-flagged for 17 minutes while the track was cleaned.

When the session resumed the two BMW Sauber F1 Team drivers went out right away: Nick for a short three-lap stint on softs and Robert for a six-lap stint on supersofts. Nick set a time of 1:18.428 minutes to temporarily take ninth place and immediately pitted for the supersofts.

In the meantime, Robert set his personal fastest lap of 1:17.601 minutes on the first timed lap of his second stint. With this time, he temporarily moved up to fourth position - but a lot of drivers went out in the closing stages of the session for one fast lap, while Robert completed a six-lap stint without really going for a fast lap time. Therefore, he dropped back to 13th place.

Furthermore, Nick was in trouble. After his tyre change he went out again but was visibly cruising round the 'Circuit Gilles Villeneuve'. When he returned to the pits without having completed a flying lap, his car caught fire.