Mark Hughes: Trackside View

The minutes to the session are ticking down, the track with its new, jet-black surface has never looked so good. The sound of air guns from the garages, then engines being warmed, French chatter through the PA system, the flags of the world fluttering in the breeze high above.

The red light at the end of the pitlane goes out as the green comes on. Anthony Davidson - first car in the first garage - gets out first. Takuma Sato has to be pushed through a three-point turn by the mechanics, delaying Adrian Sutil and Jarno Trulli for a few seconds. Nick Heidfeld is just leaving the pitlane as Davidson completes an installation lap and returns. As he's pushed into the garage you can smell the hot oil on the breeze.

A McLaren - Fernando Alonso - comes out and peels to the left, the lane reserved for dummy starts. He does one, the Mercedes engine falling down almost to tick-over as the traction control does its stuff, before then accelerating savagely. Giancarlo Fisichella then goes through the same procedure in the Renault and its t/c sounds much harsher.

Further round the track, down at the fifth-gear Estoril turn two, before the part where the uphill camber aids the car, Alex Wurz experiences a sudden loss of front-end grip in the Williams, has a viscous twitch that carries him out to the edge of the run-off area, the lap ruined virtually before it's begun.

At just this moment Lewis Hamilton is coasting to a halt further into the lap, the engine protection system having kicked in. He climbs out, is taken back to the pits in a service car while the McLaren is loaded onto a truck, ready to be taken back to the team's garages.

They approach the penultimate turn flat out down a steep hill before getting hard on the brakes and firing off a sequence of five downchanges. There's a lot of variation in the timing of the changes. Some are evenly spaced 1-2-3-4-5, like Heikki Kovalainen's, all completed in the space of around 2sec.

But mostly you hear the final downchange only after a gap: 1-2-3-4---5. Mostly they are done with the car in a straight line. But then there's Felipe Massa, who begins the downchanging later and so is still pulling on the paddle even as he's almost at the apex.

Hamilton's car goes by on the back of the access road truck. A few minutes later he's back on track.

Between the penultimate and final turn his car never quite loses its dynamic lateral state, on tippy toes from the moment of braking right to the exit of the final turn and on the part that connects the two, the car follows a long, twitching arc before Hamilton turns in, dancing on the throttle. On the next lap he's launching a full-on attack on the pitlane speed limit line, front-right smoking.

But if he has a rival for level of attack, it's Robert Kubica who has come out in the last few minutes of the session, having been delayed with a technical problem. These are his first laps since his Montreal shunt.

He's more than eager to make up for lost time, immediately hustling the BMW Sauber very hard. He's attacking the final turn's first kerb with huge aggression and is literally flying - the only one with all four wheels in the air.

The time it took you to read this should equate to a 1m16s average Magny-Cours lap.