MOTORSPORT: Wet start to Bathurst practice

There were no blistering hot laps and no headline-grabbing huge crashes. No, the weather dominated day one of the 2011 Bathurst 1000. With the track wet and grip low on what is a public road the rest of the year, times were reduced to grandma pace compared to the high-speed stuff we're used to seeing. The day ended with a damp whimper when fog on the Mountain caused the cancellation of the final of three V8 Supercar practice sessions (and the Fujitsu Series' as well). At least that was the official line.

Talking to teams, it was really about wet tyre preservation as Dunlop had not brought enough wets to supply all teams with five sets per car for the weekend, as expected. Three sets of the latest batch of wets are available for each car as well as tyres from earlier production batch, but it seems these are not highly regarded by drivers who all want to race on the latest rubber, even though they are supposedly identical to the older batch. Last night V8SC officials were auditing teams' tyre stocks and formulating a plan for tyre usage over the weekend.

Fords were quickest in the first practice session with Tim Slade's FG Falcon topping the timing sheets with a 2:24.22sec lap, closely followed by the Falcons of Shane Van Gisbergen and James Moffat. Big hitters like Jamie Whincup, Craig Lowndes and Mark Winterbottom languished lower in the order. The quickest Holden was that of reigning champion James Courtney and Cameron McConville, which was fourth but almost 1.4sec slower than Slade's mark. Steven Richards went quickest in the second 'co-driver' session with a 2:27.89sec lap in the Falcon he is sharing with Mark Winterbottom, with David Besnard, David Russell, and Mark Skaife next quickest.