Sneaking my Sky coverage via someone else's SkyGo (with their permission), I switched on at 5am to find the Melbourne broadcast area were suffering serious power outages which threatened to ruin the first qualifying of the season. Once they came back on it was clear that the rain was torrential, so torrential that race control delayed Q1 firstly by 10 minutes and following the medical car's inspection of the track another 10 minutes while the TV pictures showed marshalls' randomly sweeping water from one part of the circuit to another, some of it was obviously being done in a very desultory manner given the futility of the exercise.
FP3 was generally wet apparently, but Romain Grosjean managed to put in a dry lap in the 1m26s. I just couldn't get up at 2.30am and then again at 5am - too much and, let's face it, priorities dictate that Quali is far more important.
Melbourne, being a temporary, street circuit, doesn't drain in any way as quickly as a proper race track so it holds the water and the constant threat is that the cars would aquaplane.
With 5 rookies on the grid it was probably a good plan not to bring the cars out in the conditions experienced.
The upshot being that up until 6.20am I've been watching filler. Up for 2 hours and as of yet, no F1!
