Canada: First free practice report

By Huw Alban
June 23 2006

All the pre-weekend optimism came crashing down during first practice today when Giorgio Mondini suddenly stopped out on the track on only his second lap of the session. If that wasn't bad enough, Tiago Monteiro also stopped out on the circuit in the dying seconds of the hour.

Giorgio Mondini was amongst the first drivers out on the track at the start of the session, and was followed quickly by Christijan Albers and Tiago Monteiro. All three completed their installation laps without incident and returned to the MF1 garage.

Approximately 10 minutes later, Giorgio set out again but very quickly the Track Status indicator on the FormulaOne.com live timing panel turned to yellow and I feared the worst.

A quick query to the garage revealed that Giorgio suddenly lost all systems completely for no apparent reason. It sounds similar to the sudden failure experienced by Adrian Sutil back in May at a Silverstone test. Then, the failure was diagnosed to a simple loose wire so lets hope that Giorgio's problem is as easy to fix.

I know now that the car will be returned to the MF1 garage once the session has finished, because I saw this happening during my time with the team at the British Grand Prix. The team will have a good two hours to locate and repair whatever caused Giorgio's stoppage, so hopefully he'll be able to put in a good chunk of tyre evaluation time during the second session today.

I was slightly surprised not to see Christijan or Tiago take to the track soon after, and in fact it wasn't until only 10 minutes remained that either took to the track again. Both immediately started to post strong times, placing in the top 10 times in the last few minutes of the session.

To add to the team's troubled start to the weekend, Tiago Monteiro suddenly showed up as STOP on the live timing screen as again the session was yellow flagged.

All eyes will be on the Midland F1 driver team in two hours time hoping to see all three making up for lost time during this session. If we hear more about the reason for the stoppages we'll bring it to you as soon as we can.

Full timesheets from the First Free Practice session for the Canadian Grand Prix:

1 Robert Kubica Sauber-BMW 1:16.390
2 Anthony Davidson Honda 1:18.306
3 Alexander Wurz Williams-Cosworth 1:18.941
4 Michael Schumacher Ferrari 1:18.994
5 Rubens Barrichello Honda 1:19.070
6 Jenson Button Honda 1:19.165
7 Neel Jani STR-Cosworth 1:19.258
8 Robert Doornbos RBR-Ferrari 1:19.681
9 Vitantonio Liuzzi STR-Cosworth 1:20.154
10 Christijan Albers MF1-Toyota 1:20.646
11 Tiago Monteiro MF1-Toyota 1:20.799
12 Ralf Schumacher Toyota 1:20.861
13 Franck Montagny Super Aguri-Honda 1:21.783
14 Takuma Sato Super Aguri-Honda 1:21.891
15 Sakon Yamamoto Super Aguri-Honda 1:23.159
16 Felipe Massa Ferrari 1:23.179
17 Jarno Trulli Toyota 1:24.029

 

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