F1 Bahrain GP in Malaysia: Follow FP3 at Sepang with live timing

Fernando's pole position time was 1m37.044s. But this was set under the bizarre and needlessly abstruse rules at the time, where there were two separate one-hour sessions on Friday and Saturday, the drivers took turns to set a lap, and the running order on Saturday was the reverse of the timed order on Friday. Oh, and on Saturday you had to run with the fuel load with which you planned to start the race.

Got that? Good... 

Let's not forget, this track was the venue for Fernando Alonso's first pole position in 2003. He finished on the podium, too, behind first time winner... oh, what was his name? Ah yes, Kimi Raikkonen.

Photo by: Getty Images

And it's just an installation lap for Lawson - he's back in.

Sepang circuit really is a time capsule of what people thought would make for great racing around the turn of the century. It's very wide, because it was thought this would assist overtaking (spoiler alert: it didn't). The fiddly first couple of corners with frequently shifting camber was intended to fool drivers into making mistakes (spoiler alert: it didn't, in F1 at least). Track designer Hermann Tilke returned to this well several teams as he expanded his portfolio worldwide.

And in case you need to catch up on other matters of moment from the past week, here you go:-

HEY HEY FROM MALAY(SIA)

FP3 is about to get under way at Sepang and there was a lot to digest overnight. Degradation was the word of the day on Friday thanks to this track's "sandpaper" surface – nobody has run the hard-compound C2 tyre yet, and that's the one we expect to be the main race tyre.

Looking at race pace over the long runs in FP2, a picture emerged of Red Bull being marginally the quickest (and on medium tyres too), with McLaren and Ferrari not that far behind. Interestingly, Mercedes – running a new upgrade package this weekend – were a few tenths off.