Sutil shines on wet Suzuka track

Adrian Sutil underlined his stature as a wet weather specialist by posting the quickest time in Friday's rain-marred second practice session ahead of Sunday's Japanese Grand Prix.

Heavy rain nearly washed out Friday's practice sessions and it was worse in the afternoon as puddles covered the track for the first hour, with only the final 10 minutes allowing the field to venture out to complete flying laps.

Force India did extremely well in the difficult conditions, with Sutil setting the quickest time of the afternoon on the drenched track, while teammate Vitantonio Liuzzi was just 0.6 secs behind with the third fastest lap.

Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel was second in this session with 1:47.923.

In the morning also, Sutil was consistently among the quickest and, despite only completing 14 laps, recorded the third best time.

Liuzzi similarly did just 15 laps and was 12th fastest after losing some time on his potentially fastest lap with some traffic and then under steer, which caused him to lock up going into the final sector.

Sutil knows the track like the back of his palm and the German said he thoroughly enjoyed the sessions.

"It was a really easy session this afternoon -- just 10 minutes and my first lap was P1! This morning we did just 14 laps and things went quite well," he said.

"I was confident we would be back on the pace in Suzuka and at the moment we are looking much better than in Singapore. But still nobody really knows the score about the weather and dry set-ups so it will be an interesting weekend for sure," he said.

Liuzzi too was happy with the way his car behaved but sounded wary of the weather.

"Overall the car worked very well in the wet weather conditions and also with the intermediate tyre balance and finally in the last five minutes we could try the extreme wet balance too.

"Everything is responding and working well, although we do know tomorrow could be different if the weather changes, but we are optimistic," said the Italian.