Grapevine: Straw Poll: Friday at Fuji

A Toyota on top in free practice at Toyota-owned Fuji Speedway certainly gave the home crowd something to cheer, as long as they didn't look at the Honda firmly anchored at the base of the timesheets.

But, as usual, it was another low-key Friday in terms of track activity, especially for the surprisingly large number of fans clad in Super Aguri garb who had no Takuma Sato to cheer on.

The most attention-grabbing thing about the track action was how awful the green stripes, painted along the grooves of the Bridgestone tyres to show support for the FIA's "Make Cars Green" campaign looked on track!

Still, it's a campaign designed to raise awareness, so it wouldn't be much use if they were inconspicuous, even if it does open up the sport to the usual "greenwash" accusations.

So it was left to the off-track activities to provide the entertainment and intrigue. But as one press room luminary put it, "It's one of the dullest Fridays I've known."

The general gloom of the global financial crisis certainly wasn't helping, and the main topic on the agenda was the prospect of cost-saving rule changes designed to save the sport from the apocalyptic vision of financial meltdown voiced by FIA President Max Mosley earlier this week.

The need to cut spending has been talked about with increasing frequency, and save for the occasional measure - most notably the engine freeze - things generally don't change too much. But this time, it's serious.

Although there is plenty of dissent over the direction the future rules should take, the teams are no longer blanket-bombing every clutch of suggestions that come their way.

The idea of the single engine, or more likely an engine built around certain common components, has been mooted by Mosley and was heavily debated Friday afternoon's press conference, which throws together a quartet of management and technical types rather than drivers, produced an enormous amount of discussion, and it was Toyota motorsport president John Howett who shed the most light on the subject.

He summed up the need for the teams to be united early on in the piece, saying "hopefully for once we can put politics behind us" as well as the importance of not making any knee-jerk reactions. A glance at the transcript from the press conference gives you a good idea of the kinds of discussions that will take place.

It may have been a dull day, but there are matters of great interest brewing.