Bridgestone's soft tyre took Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro's Fernando Alonso to the fastest time of the day amidst typically mixed weather conditions at the Spa Francorchamps circuit in Belgium.

Alonso set his 1m 49.032secs time on a largely dry track right at the end of the afternoon session, which was interrupted by a red flag period. Alonso was also fastest in the morning's wet conditions, using Bridgestone's wet tyre to set his time. The full weather range of Bridgestone Potenza's were used today, with the wet and intermediate as well as hard and soft dry slick tyres all seeing track action.

Q&A with Hirohide Hamashima - Bridgestone Director of Motorsport Tyre Development

What was significant about today's running?
"Today we were able to evaluate our full range of tyres that we have here in Spa, so this gives us and the teams useful data when looking to the rest of the weekend. Over the years we have seen a lot of rain here at Spa, but today it has been very wet indeed. Despite this, we were still able to have some dry running between the showers. The teams will be able to determine the crossover point for when is best to change from the wet to the intermediate or to the dry tyres and this could prove vital if we have a wet qualifying session tomorrow, or wet race on Sunday."

How do you expect this allocation to work over the weekend?
"When we have variable weather conditions, the challenge is being on the right tyre at the right time. This challenge is made even more difficult when you have a long lap like here in Spa. As we saw today, one part of the track can be nearly dry, whilst another very wet. A wet tyre wears very quickly when used on a dry track and a dry tyre is not very good when the track is very wet, so the drivers and teams have a lot of work to do in these conditions."

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Stats of the Day:
Practice One 10:00 - 11:30: 
Driver 		   Team			Time 	    Tyre 
Fernando Alonso    Scuderia Ferrari	2m 00.797s  W
Lewis Hamilton     Vodafone McLaren	2m 01.567s  W
Robert Kubica 	   Renault F1 Team 	2m 02.081s  W
 

Practice Two 14:00 - 15:30
Driver 		   Team			Time 	    Tyre
Fernando Alonso    Scuderia Ferrari 	1m 49.032s  S
Adrian Sutil 	   Force India F1 Team  1m 49.157s  H
Lewis Hamilton 	   Vodafone McLaren 	1m 49.248s  S

Compounds used: Wet / Intermediate /Hard / Soft

Temperatures 	 Ambient  Track   Weather
AM - Practice 1  18C 	  18C-19C Rain / Drizzle / Partly cloudy
PM - Practice 2  19C-20C  21C-25C Partly cloudy / Sunny