It's just a few days until the five red lights go out and the F1 season gets underway, behind the scenes over 190,000 man hours has gone into converting the normally quiet streets around Albert Park lake into the circuit we'll see over the weekend. This time lapse video shows the enormous amount of work and planning that goes into the first event of the F1 season.
So the circuit is ready, the teams will be unpacking tons of equipment, what will the weather bring?
Friday looks like it'll give a decent chance for a final shakedown of the new cars, with fine, dry warm weather and light winds, but as we head into the weekend things start to head downhill.
Winds will increase overnight, and more cloud will roll in, currently it's touch and go whether any rain will disrupt final practice and qualifying, but on the last few data runs the risk of heavy rain and possible storms increases through the afternoon into the evening with some torrential spells possible, qualifying starts at 5pm local time. Temperature wise it'll feel similar to Friday, in the high twenties, but once the storms and rain have blasted through it'll turn considerably cooler. As with all storm forecasts, timings will most likely change, and any storm may not happen over Melbourne at all, but it has been modelled reasonably consistently over the last day or two.
And that leaves Sunday, Race Day, light rain may continue for a while through the morning and currently it's looking dry at race time (0600 GMT), but some 8-10c cooler at around 17-19c, with patchy cloud and a westerly breeze, track temperatures will be very different - and after the expected heavy overnight rain it'll feel like a different surface with the usual Melbourne problems of high track temperatures and tyre degradation probably not being such a factor.
You can follow the latest forecast updates for
Albert Park here, times are GMT, so 6am is race time.
