Why Korea could be a wild one

This one has got the ingredients of a wild race.

We had a rained-out Friday, during which the meaningful laps were all on wet-weather tyres or intermediates, and the forecast is for more rain in free practice on Saturday morning, followed by a dry qualifying and race.

If it pans out this way, teams will be left with no information about tyre behaviour for a race in which this is going to be extra-crucial - given the aggressive choice by Pirelli of the supersoft/soft combination, and a 'green' track that's likely to aggravate tyre wear.

Schumacher topped the first practice session for Mercedes © LAT

What action we saw on Friday had Michael Schumacher's Mercedes quickest of the wet-tyred running in the first session, and Lewis Hamilton's McLaren at the head of the inter-shod runners later on, around 12 seconds quicker. Even though the rain eased off, the track was never quite dry enough for slicks, although both McLarens, Mark Webber's Red Bull and the two Toro Rossos all gave it a go right at the end, this resulting in various spins and abandoned laps.

Hamilton and Jenson Button - separated by just a tenth - were 1.8s clear of the closely-matched Red Bull of Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari of Fernando Alonso. Hamilton pretty much repeated his earlier pace on a further run too. With the damp track at just 18 degrees, this was likely all about generating tyre temperature, something that the McLaren does more quickly and effectively than the Red Bull or Ferrari.

Interesting though this is, it will be of no significance if the weather is as forecast. If there is indeed no dry running in Saturday practice, qualifying is set to be a tense period of educated guesswork, and the performance patterns of Suzuka last week will be looming very large in the minds of the engineers at Ferrari, McLaren and - particularly - Red Bull.

The Pirellis this year behave rather differently to Bridgestone tyres of recent years in that their performance degradation increases the faster you go. So on those tracks particularly challenging for the chosen compounds, the Red Bull - as the fastest car - cannot use all of its potential performance.

Much of Red Bull's Suzuka weekend was spent trying to trade off potential qualifying speed for competitive stint duration. "It's been a constant trade-off for much of the season," admitted team principal Christian Horner. "But it was particularly acute at Suzuka. In fact I was surprised we were able to set pole with the set-up we had." Even that set-up - which the team believes surrendered up to 0.8s of potential qualifying pace - was not enough to give the RB7 race-winning pace on Sunday.

Pirelli's slicks were not called into action on Friday © LAT

That same process of choosing the trade-off point will have to be compressed into a tiny window on Saturday. So if the tyre choice proves to be as marginal for the demands as it was at Suzuka, then we're likely to see a similar picture, one where the Red Bull suffers more performance degradation than the McLaren - and both suffer more than Ferrari. But with track position also being crucially important, neither Red Bull nor McLaren can set up for ultimate race pace, as this will surely hurt their grid positions.

It was no coincidence either that McLaren's potential pole-winning pace at Suzuka came as it fully used its new rear wing, with its more aggressive DRS phase. All these things considered, could this be the race where the Red Bull's RB7 monopoly of poles is broken? McLaren must surely be optimistic that it can combine competitive race-stint duration with the sort of qualifying pace it lacked earlier in the season. The trick will be in how finely judged the team can be in its set-up: get it too far biased towards one-lap pace and, while the MP4-26 may halt the Red Bull run of poles, it could be left vulnerable to the tyre-easy Ferrari in the race.

All that said, it may just be that the track is not as tough on the rubber as expected. There isn't even any significant dry running from last year to go on - and as such the whole problem may have been overrated.

This is, therefore, a race for gamblers.