While track action was atr a minimum in China today, it has far reaching issues than just the fans being bored for the day, in fact missing Friday's on track time means that teams go into qualifying and the race not knowing as much about the tyres as they'd like, for example how long they will last and what the performance difference is between the compounds - and those data are the basis for a drivers race strategy.

Teams will miss the time for set-up tweaking to fine-tune the balance as well, but these days you arrive at the track with a pretty good balance so they shouldn't be hurt too badly.

The nature of modern Formula 1 is that, even if it's wet in practice, they limit the amount of running because they don't want to spin off or damage the car and be on the back foot for the rest of the weekend.

So most of the time when the drivers use the wet tyres it's a voyage of discovery for them - and that's where you see their ability really come to the fore.

Mercedes are fortunate that, in situations like this, their two drivers have the skills to limit any disadvantage.

“Obviously not a great day. I've only done one lap on the 2017 wet tyres so far this year and, from what I could tell on that out-lap, they feel pretty similar to last year's so I don't have any particular worries over it. But there's a bigger picture today,” Lewis said. “The track was absolutely fine and we could have run all day today with no issue if it weren't for the clouds.”

“It's not good for the fans watching on TV and even worse for all those people in the stands, who have paid money to come out here from the city or even from other countries. They've barely seen a car on track today, which must be tough for them. We need to work together with the FIA and FOM to find a solution or an alternative plan of some kind when we have circumstances like this in the future.”
Saturday should be the best of the three days in term of weather but Sunday is looking quite troublesome.