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FIA Race Director Michael Masi has outlined the options available should weather affect Saturday’s running at the Sochi Autodrom, with the potential for qualifying for the Russian Grand Prix to be moved to Sunday morning.
Torrential rain, as well as thunder and lightning, hit the track on Saturday morning, leading to doubts over the running of the day’s programme – with Masi revealing what he and his team were seeing on their weather radars.
“As we can see already this morning, the weather’s gone up and down like a yoyo, and the intensity of the rain has been increasing, with some thunder also joining us,” said Masi. “But effectively the procedure per today will be that we will aim to start all sessions, get everything ready from an operational perspective, and then judge the conditions at the time.
“What we’re seeing from the forecast side is that we will have… rain until about 1330-1430 local time, and then it decreasing in the afternoon.
“The priority from today’s perspective is obviously Formula 1 qualifying this afternoon,” Masi went on.
“So Formula 1 will take priority, then we were fortunate in restructuring the programme to have the first Formula 3 race yesterday, pre-empting the weather that was going to happen this morning, which based on what we saw when we came out to the circuit this morning was absolutely the right decision; it was torrential at the time we would have been having the F3 race. So we did that, and now we’ll just sort of look at the day ahead and just take it step by step.”