Buzzin F1 - Formula One Blog

Felipe Massa has been the fastest man on the track so far in the practice sessions for this weekends Bahrain Grand Prix.

He was lapping today nearly a second faster than his teammate, Kimi Raikkonen and leaving the rest of the drivers trailing behind him.

On his hottest lap his time was 1:31.420, nearly a second faster than he managed last year in Bahrain when he was on pole position.

Heikki Kovalainen was the third fastest man in the leading McLaren ahead of his teammate Lewis Hamilton who now has a badly damaged car.  On the exit of turn six, towards the end of the session, Hamilton ran wide and managed to get all four wheels on the kerb which span the car around and put him into the barrier on the entry into turn eight.  The car was quite badly damaged on the right hand side and there is a fair amount of work to be done on the car to get it ready for the Saturday qualifying session.

The BMW Sauber driver, Robert Kubica was in fifth place while his not so successful teammate, Nick Heidfeld could only manage seventeenth out of the twenty two runners.

The Williams Toyota drivers, Nico Rosberg and Kazuki Nakajima were an impressive sixth and eighth, sandwiching the Red Bull of David Coulthard.

In ninth place was Sebastien Bourdais in the Toro Rosso Ferrari while Sebastian Vettel again struggled for pace and finished down in twentieth.

Nelson Piquet rounded up the top ten in the Renault while Fernando Alonso took on an unnecessary battle with the Force India driver Adrian Sutil for track position.  Baulked by Sutil, Alonso proceeded to out-brake himself and then make contact with the side of Sutil.

Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello, the Honda drivers were in eleventh and sixteenth with Mark Webber and the Toyota pair, Jarno Trulli and Timo Glock in between them.

Giancarlo Fisichella for Force India was in eighteenth place with the Super Aguri duo of Takuma Sato and Anthony Davidson were at the bottom of the time sheets behind Vettel.