Rain wipes out second practice at Spa
Continued precipitation at Spa-Francorchamps made the second 90 minutes of free practice largely worthless, with no representative times being set despite a few intrepid souls venturing out on track.
Charles Pic stole the headlines - if there were any - by posting the fastest lap of the session on the occasion of Marussia's 50th grand prix weekend, but the fact that Nico Hulkenberg's five-lap tally was the highest of the 90 minutes says a lot about the impossibility of the conditions.
Indeed, no-one took to the track until the final half hour of the afternoon, with Nico Rosberg the first to decide that he could sit around and wait no longer. Like many of those to follow him, the German survived the pitfalls of a surface hidden underwater, and returned to the pits - only to head straight back out and do it all again in search of data on race starts. Heikki Kovalainen spun at Les Combes as he attempted to follow the Mercedes driver's lead, while Michael Schumacher repeated his team-mate's programme.
Most of the field eventually took their turn on track, albeit without troubling the timesheets, and it was only in the final few minutes that anyone opted to continue along the start-finish straight and post a 'flying' lap. Just as the media were writing that there had been no results to report, Pastor Maldonado and Timo Glock popped up with times, only to see Pic pip them at the post.
The Frenchman's mark of 2min 49.354secs was some 38 seconds slower than Kamui Kobayashi's FP1 benchmark - and bettered by everyone to complete a lap in that session - but put him three-tenths clear of second-placed Daniel Ricciardo. Fernando Alonso was third fastest, ahead of Paul di Resta and Maldonado, while Glock, Kobayashi, Jean-Eric Vergne, Hulkenberg and Sergio Perez were the others to record times. Mark Webber, meanwhile, headed the list of those not to even venture out, the Australian resolutely showing guests around the Red Bull garage as Lotus team-mates Kimi Raikkonen and Romain Grosjean joined Vitaly Petrov, Pedro de la Rosa and Narain Karthikeyan in deciding that there was nothing to gain from getting wet.
