Mark Hughes: Trackside View

the beginning of the Friday afternoon session Mount Fuji's peak is sleeping behind a blanket of cloud. Even amid all this noise. How do you wake a giant some 3,776 metres below that peak?

Turn 10, Dunlop, sits at the lowest far corner of the track and precedes the twisty incline that eventually takes the cars back to the pitstraight. It's a rude, first gear interruption to a top-gear straight - six rapid-fire downshifts - and is already beginning to go uphill at its apex.

Kimi Raikkonen and Lewis Hamilton are extravagantly sideways on entry first time through, with whole armfuls of opposite lock, off the power, just collecting the moment on tyres not yet up to temperature.

Next lap Lewis stops, creating a gap in the traffic, the McLaren sitting there on tickover like a shopping car looking for a parking space. Then the violence of acceleration as the car disappears.

Raikkonen and Hamilton have refined their approach, the tyres now co-operating fully and their entry neat and precise, each getting on the power just before the apex.

They have only a little bit of traction control dialled in, preferring to use the throttle to get a shallow powerslide on the exit and leaning the outside-rear hard against the favourable camber.

They are each around 10-deg out of line and only then do you hear the soft misfire of computer control as they proceed up the hill. They look identical in the way they approach this section.

By contrast, Anthony Davidson's Super Aguri is lacking overall grip. It still hasn't really finished getting turned into the first part when it's time to change direction, and Anthony's using a combination of kerb and throttle to wrestle the thing into pointing in the right direction. A fan looks on, wearing a cardboard replica Takuma Sato helmet. He talks with his friend, 'helmet' on the whole time.

Quite a few others are showing support for Adrian Sutil, who raced here in F3 last year. One husband and wife couple have a flag each, one with 'Adrian' written upon it, the other with 'Sutil'.

Each time he appears they impassively raise their respective flags and lower them again as he passes. The mountain still can't be bothered to wipe the fog from its head and we won't see it again for the rest of the weekend.