Kimi Räikkönen took to the track for the first practice sessions of 2012 today, with variable weather affecting the opening day of the Australian Grand Prix weekend at Albert Park.

Alan Permane, Trackside Operations Director - Technical programme notes

We completed limited running due to the inclement weather; you learn little on a wet track and our forecast suggests dry days tomorrow and Sunday.

We ran with Pirelli’s full allocation of tyre types for this event; medium and soft dry tyres, and intermediate and wet tyres.

We changed the steering rack on Kimi’s car during the first session.

What we learned today:

The E20 worked well on high fuel loads in the dry conditions at the end of FP2

We have a solid baseline wet set-up.

Kimi Räikkönen, E20-03

Free practice 1: P9, 1:29.565, 8 laps
Free practice 2: P18, 1:34.275, 7 laps

Kimi: “We didn’t really learn much from today due to the weather, but it’s the same for everyone. We tried a different steering rack in the first session. It would have been fine to run, but we knew that the base system would be better. The setup we have now is working well, it may take a while before we get it perfect but we’ll make the best of it. Hopefully the weather will be better tomorrow and we’ll be happier after qualifying. I didn’t push too hard today; if it’s dry tomorrow we’ll have a better idea of what we need to do.”

James Allison, Technical Director: “It was a day dominated by the weather. At this time of year your cupboards are not overflowing with spare parts so it would be foolhardy to risk damaging anything unnecessarily. The rest of the weekend is predicted to be dry, so discretion was the better part of valour. This meant we stayed in the box for most of the day. When it did look sensible to venture out on track we did so with both drivers and the E20 looked solid in the second session with a high fuel load. We have a baseline steering set-up for Kimi which works, but we tried a different option at the start of FP1. He wasn’t convinced by it so we went back to our baseline. As the conditions were not conducive to running we didn’t miss an undue amount of track time.