Weather, again plays a little trick on all the teams this week in Zhuhai. The earlier forecast was calling for rain through the week then drying up for the weekend. Most of the teams prepared for a wet week but to everyone's surprises, not a single drop of rain came down through three days of practice. The Friday official practice sessions and Qualifying enjoyed perfect but punishing heat throughout the day.

During the early morning session, the Changan Ford drivers went out in formation and utilizing the already warmed up tires, immediately jumped to the front of the time sheet. Rainey He was sitting on top with 1:50.220, followed by Andy Yan with 1:50.995 and Jiang Tengyi with 1:51.253. Their new teammate of the season, Fan Gaoxiang, continued his struggle and could only achieved 1:53 range early in the session.

By lap 3, Jiang Tengyi picked up his pace and overtook Andy Yan with a time of 1:50.555. He held that position until lap 7 when Andy found a clear lap and made a time of 1:50.475.

In the meantime, Rainey was very happy with his car and came in making only a couple very minor adjustments. He improved his time to 1:50.136 after he went back out. The three Changan Ford drivers occupied the first three positions of official practice one.

The second session started in the midday and the track temperature increased substantially. Rainey decided to skip the session and the other three drivers went out to collect more data. The feedback from the drivers confirmed that the track condition changed a lot comparing to the morning session. At the end of the session, both Andy and Tengyi continued to stay in the top group while Fan made improvement and moved to 7th.

After three hours of intensive work, the cars hit the track again at 3.40pm to fight for the starting position for tomorrow's race.

Taking advantage of the track cleaning by the previous race, the team decided to work on an early attack strategy. All the cars fitted with warm tires coming out from the tire warming chamber and the drivers were told to move out to the pit lane to take the front positions. Everything worked according to plan but the race had to be restarted after one car spun out and caused a red flag.

After the restart, Rainey scored his fastest time of 1:49.825 on lap 2. He came in to the pit immediately and waited for further actions. Andy also scored his best time in lap 2 and Tengyi on lap 3. The three Changan Ford Focus were trying to repeat the 1,2,3 finish that they did in race 1. Zhang Han Biao of Huayang came for fresh tires and made a very quick lap of 1:50.092 and took over the second position. Fan Gaoxiang also came in for fresh tires and improved his time good enough to put himself fifth on the grid.

 

Tengyi also got his new tires but he could not improve sufficient to move his positions. So the team decided to give him another two new tires with only 5 minutes to go. The team mechanics did a magnificent job of changing his two tires in less than a minute and sent him back out. Unfortunately these two tires didn't help either and he missed the chance going to the press conference which only have seats reserved for the top three qualifiers.

The four Changan Ford Focus will start tomorrow's race 1, 3, 4 and 5 on the grid giving them huge advantage of getting podium positions."