Wet weekend expected in Austin but race could be dry

2018 United States Grand Prix weather

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Persistent rain, some of it heavy, is forecast in the coming days at the Circuit of the Americas, scene of this weekend’s United States Grand Prix.

However the lowest chance of rain is on Sunday, so the race could pass without disruption from the weather. It would be a situation not entirely dissimilar to 2015, where rain forced the cancellation of one practice session and part of qualifying, but the race was run on a largely dry track.

The chance of rain is consistently high throughout much of Friday and Saturday. There has already been considerable rainfall in the area already (flash flood warnings have been issued in some areas) and more is also expected on Thursday. Although much of the run-off at the track is asphalt there are some grass areas as well which are likely to be saturated by the persistent rainfall.

Air temperatures will be on the cool side and are unlikely to hit 20C. While Sunday is not expected to be significantly warmer, current models indicate the worst of the rain will pass by Saturday evening and there is a good chance of a dry race day.

However teams may have little chance to prepare their cars for dry running before then.

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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11 comments on “Wet weekend expected in Austin but race could be dry”

  1. That rules out Ferrari and Vettel then.

    1. Panagiotis Papatheodorou (@panagiotism-papatheodorou)
      18th October 2018, 10:02

      Never say never. Lewis was out qualified by Nico in Austin back in 2015.

      1. In a Mercedes, though..

        1. 2014 as well but in 2015… they only took the Q2 result

  2. Daniel (@collettdumbletonhall)
    18th October 2018, 10:00

    Damn, always seems to be a wet qualifying and never a wet race.

    1. @collettdumbletonhall – we can’t have ’em wet all the time.

      ( And yes, that was a double entendre ;-) )

      1. My wife asked for a double entendre for her birthday, so I gave her one.

    2. @collettdumbletonhall I wish it was rather the other way round.

    3. Yes, would like a wet race as well, honestly I really like rain in f1, ofc it helps hamilton as not only he, along verstappen, is supposed to be the best current wet-driver, but mercedes also seems superior, however it adds some unpredictability.

      In recent times we’ve had very few wet races, unless you call a couple of laps a wet race in hockhenheim 2018, or 1\3 of the race singapore 2017, or again 1\3 I think china 2017, the last serious wet race was interlagos 2016 and the last serious important wet session was monza qualifying 2017.

  3. 2015 all over again. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to move this race to June to form a double-header with the Canadian GP after all.

    1. Agreed it wo9uld make lots of good sense to have all the americas races in one month.. ie Mexico,Canada,USA and Brazil…i suppose it would make logistics easier ..

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