It was a tricky sort of a day at the Portimão. The sort of Friday that ruins plans. A hint of rain in the morning, then actual rain in the afternoon. Though the rain was not heavy enough to cause anyone to pull in for wets, it was just enough to dampen the kerbs and turn the white lines treacherous. It was more like mist than rain. Wet air.
“The rain was very light and the kerbs, as soon as they started to have this kind of dusty rain, which was strange, were super slippery,” Pecco Bagnaia said. “As soon as you were arriving close to the white line, the front was locking and the rear was spinning.”
The rain cleared away almost as soon as it started, but that also made timing tricky. The teams had been watching the rain arrive on their radars, and tried to time their fast laps perfectly. But if you went early, you risked running out of soft tires if the track dried out. Which it did, shuffling the order in the last few minutes.
The light was tricky as well. There were points where you couldn’t tell whether the track was damp or not. “It was so sketchy, because it feels like it’s dry, and then you put your foot down and it tells you otherwise,” Brad Binder said.
Timing is everything
