Sauber started the weekend with a good Friday. Kobayashi was 3rd fastest and Sergio Perez finished the day on a respectable 9th position. Technical director James Key warns though that it's early to draw conclusions: "It is great to be back at Silverstone in British summer time! We have good new facilities with a lot of garage space and a big crowd here in the rain. There is probably not much we can read into today with the conditions, as it was quite tricky to draw many conclusions."

Key continued: "Fundamentally we got some good experience of the intermediate and wet tyres, which could be quite important for the rest of the weekend. In the morning we had some aero test parts on Sergio's car, while with Kamui we initially had some test parts, but changed them for standard parts due to the weather conditions. I think Sergio's programme worked quite well using the intermediate tyres, and he had a balance he was quite happy with in the conditions in FP1."

Kamui Kobayashi finished the day as 3rd and had an eventful day. The Japanese driver crashed in the first session and his car suffered a lot of damage. The team was able to repair the car and he was able to compete in the second session: "Kamui was slightly less happy, but unfortunately he just clipped the outside of turn 16 and just as the surface changed he lost the rear end, which led to an off. The good thing is he was okay. The car was damaged, but not particularly badly and the guys did a great job to put it all together again for FP2. The second session was very, very wet to begin with and gradually it got better. Again we tried the wet tyre to begin with, which took a while to warm up and then the intermediate tyre at the end of the session as the track improved. We shall look at the data tonight but I don't think there is much we can read into it for tomorrow, but ultimately the car seems to be working okay in wet conditions."