I wasn´t at home to watch the qualifying live on TV because I went to visit my sister with my sons and you can´t watch Formula 1 racing live at her place... Actually it´s Sunday evening (very late) when I´m writing this and the race has already been driven so please excuse me if this blog post is kind of confusing! But now I´m taking the time to look back at the qualifying on Saturday and write down my thoughts.
For Lotus F1 Team the Q1 didn´t go as they had planned. This time it was Grosjean at the wheel of his E20 who got knocked out of Q2! The Frenchman had an incident with HRT´s De La Rosa and Grosjean lost his front wing in the incident. Luckily he did have enough time to make another run but despite that he didn´t manage to set a lap time fast enough to make it in to the Q2. Lotus definitely had the potential needed to go faster but it was another failure for Grosjean. One incident after another I´m starting to wonder if the Frenchman will ever deserve a renewed contract with Lotus for next season... Incidents like the one with De La Rosa definitely don´t make Grosjean look any better!
Q2 showed that the Red Bulls and the McLarens had the potential to fight for pole at Interlagos. The performance of some teams caught my eye. Schumacher at the wheel of Mercedes had his farewell qualifying of his career but the German didn´t manage to make it among the top ten while his team-mate Rosberg had no difficulties to be among the ten fastest drivers. The situation at Williams was quite similar to that at Mercedes: Maldonado showed some excellent speed whilst Senna wasn´t fast enough to make his way through in to the final session!
Q3 turned out to be quite a surprising one! I never thought that McLaren could make it a front row lock-out at Interlagos! So there were no Red Bulls on the first row! Hamilton snatched pole by only 55 thousandths of a second over his team-mate Button! Webber was the faster Red Bull driver on Saturday and made it in P3. Sebastian made some mistakes at his first attempt and he was only able to make his way through to P4. Luckily his main rival Alonso was left in P8 so P4 seemed a totally decent place to start the race. Maldonado qualified in P6 but he got reprimanded for ignoring the FIA´s call to come to weigh-in. That was the third reprimand for the Venezuelan this season and therefore he was handed a 10-place grid penalty which made Alonso 7th on the grid. Kimi at the wheel of his E20 faced a tough qualiftying due to all the problems he had had during the weekend (like an engine failure on Saturday morning). He was only able to make it in to P9 but gained a position due to Maldonado´s penalty.
To be honest, I was pretty concerned about the championship fight before the very last race of the season. One of my concerns was Massa starting in P5 right behind Vettel... I knew Ferrari were capable of anything like we had seen at Austin. I was very much afraid that Massa might deliberately hit Vettel to knock him out of the race or something as crazy as that... I was also very concerned about the Brasilian weather. The forecasts said there was about 40-60 % chance of rain at the time of the race... Everyone knows that when it rains anything can happen. I definitely knew that Sebastian´s third world championship couldn´t be taken for granted! I knew Alonso would have a strong possibility to finish on the podium but no matter what, I trusted in Sebastian from the bottom of my heart and I knew he was going to do everything, absolutely everything, to make his dream of the third world title to come true!
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