Kimi Räikkönen & Sebastian Vettel

Kimi Räikkönen & Sebastian Vettel

lauantai 14. huhtikuuta 2012

Chinese GP / Qualifying: What a shocking Q2!

I have come down with a flu and a terribly sore throat so the thought of the upcoming GP weekend made me cheer up a little. So if I write something goofy it´s because I don´t feel very well at the moment ;) I had high hopes that all the kung fu training had given Sebastian Vettel whole new wings for the qualifying today... And that a front row grid slot for Seb today would make my flu disappear! ;) The reality turned out to be different from my fantasies!

Q1 was very predictable so no surprises in the first session. Vettel kept me in suspense though because he didn´t go out at the end of the session any more and he really wasn´t so far away from the knock-out zone... Luckily his time was fast enough to make it to the Q2!

But the Q2 then... It was full of surprises! The first of them was that the battle to get to the top 10 was extremely tight! All the drivers in top ten were within 2 tenths of a second! Both of the Mercedes drivers as well as both McLaren drivers were among the ten fastest. Sergio Perez in his Sauber has clearly been able to maintain his momentum after Malaysia and he was able to make his way into the Q3 as well as his Japanese team-mate Kobayashi. Sauber seems to have become a serious threat to the other top teams! But what made the Q2 shocking like I wrote on the headline of this text was the fact that Sebastian Vettel didn´t manage to set a lap time fast enough to make his way through to the Q3!! And what made it even more contradictory was the fact that his team-mate Webber topped the timesheets in Q2! Vettel being knocked out of the Q3 is something that hasn´t happened for a while, not since the Brazilian GP in 2009! I was stunned, upset, totally appalled by this! And this didn´t certainly make my flu go away, just the opposite, haha! ;)

If the Q2 was tight you can´t say the same about the Q3! Already at the beginning of the final session Rosberg in his Mercedes was able to set a time of 1.35.1 which was totally in the class of its own and his rivals had no chance to get even close that lap time! Hamilton qualified 2nd half a second slower than Rosberg but he has been penalized for a gearbox change and he´ll start the race from P7. Rosberg´s team-mate Schumacher was third fastest today but due to Hamilton´s penalty there´ll be an all-Mercedes front row tomorrow, which can be considered quite a surprise though there has been a lot of fuss about the innovative F-duct system used by Mercedes team... At a circuit like Shanghai the system clearly is a huge benefit for the team as it makes the car extremely fast on the long straights. Just wondering which team will be able to copy the system first...

Sauber´s Kobayashi was responsible for another surprise in Q3 by snatching P4 today! Kimi in his Lotus was fifth fastest although Lotus had to resort to the old parts instead of the new ones. So due to Hamilton´s penalty Kimi starts from P4 tomorrow. And anything can happen as Mercedes´s race pace hasn´t been that excellent this season... Webber in P6, Button in P7, Perez in P8, Alonso in P9 and Kimi´s team-mate Grosjean complete the top ten.

What to expect from tomorrow´s race? To be honest, I´m worried about Vettel´s pace. He used the older exhaust layout in his car whereas Webber used the new one. After the qualifying Vettel said that the car had felt good but it just wasn´t fast enough... Either one of the systems doesn´t seem to give the RB8 wings at the moment! So probably Vettel as well as his team-mate will have a difficult and tough race ahead of them tomorrow. But luckily China is a place full of opportunities... Seb´s team-mate once started from P18 and finished on the podium in China so only the sky will be the limit when the start lights go out... I´m crossing my fingers as firmly as I possibly can and I hope to see an eventful and entertaining race tomorrow! And I am absolutely convinced that if Seb will be able to turn adversity into profit tomorrow it will also make me get better! ;D Kimi and Sebastian, I´m putting my faith in you that you´ll make my day tomorrow!

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