Practice 2 Report - Alexander and the lightweights

Alexander Wurz set the fastest time of practice on Friday afternoon in Brazil, on a day when many of the other teams were doing silly things with fuel loads. The McLaren domination of the sport is set to continue on Saturday.

The Friday morning session saw the Austrian quickest with a best lap of 1m11.701s but in the afternoon the best he could manage was a 1m12.083s, although this was six-tenths of a second ahead of Juan-Pablo Montoya's best time. Beyond this the afternoon session showed little apart from the fact that some teams seem willing to run with fuel load loads, even if this achieves very little in the overall scheme of things.

The morning session was probably a better indication of what to expect with McLaren, BAR and Renault dicing for the best times. In the afternoon there was a clear impression that the times were not to be taken too seriously with some major cinematic productions from Sauber and Ferrari. Wurz led the way by six-tenths of a second with Montoya second and Ricardo Zonta third in the third Toyota. This was business as normal. After that came Felipe Massa and Rubens Barrichello, which seemed about as likely Barbie winning a crossword competition. Kimi Raikkonen was next up, followed the highly-unlikely Jacques Villeneuve and Michael Schumacher, who was overdriving like crazy throughout and had a big spin at one point. The Ferrari looked horrible most of the time and so it was a bit of a surprise to see it at the top end of the timesheets.

Reality reasserted itself further down the order with Jarno Trulli ahead of Giancarlo Fisichella and Fernando Alonso and then the two Williams-BMWs (Mark Webber having a spin at one point). After this things went funny again with Robert Doornbos's Minardi seeming somehow out of place ahead of the Red Bulls of David Coulthard and Tonio Liuzzi. Christian Klien was nowhere to be found having backed his Red Bull into the wall in the mid afternoon, a move which guaranteed a less than perfect start to the weekend.

The BAR-Hondas seemed off the pace in the afternoon with Jenson Button next up ahead of Ralf Schumacher, who seemed a little bit at sea, and Christijan Albers, Takuma Sato and the Jordan trio of Tiago Monteiro, Nicolas Kiesa (Jordan) and Narain Karthikeyan, who were keeping Klien company at the back.