Rain started about half an hour before the qualifying got underway. And in Malaysia you can never talk about drizzle -when it rains it usually pours with rain and the conditions get extremely wet. Due to the heavy rain the Q1 was delayed by almost an hour until the rain decreased and the conditions improved so that racing finally got underway. There was a moment in the first session when my heart nearly stopped when I heard a message on Vettel´s team radio telling the German to pit immediately due to "an issue with the car". Luckily Red Bull managed to solve the issue by resetting electronics of his car and Sebastian came back out. Mercedes´s Rosberg and Hamilton topped the time sheets but Sebastian was only half a second off Mercedes duo´s pace. Caterham´s Ericsson crashed into the barriers which caused a red flag when there were only 36 seconds left in the clock. Maldonado in his Lotus was the first man to be knocked out of Q2 whilst his French team-mate Grosjean was able to make it into the second session.
The Ferrari duo Alonso and Räikkönen and Bottas in his FW36 started to the Q2 with the intermediate tyres whilst all their rivals had put the full wets on. Another red flag occurred in Q2: Alonso at the wheel of his F14T had no visual of Toro Rosso´s Kvyat who came from behind and decided to overtake the Ferrari driver and the incident ended up in a crash between the two drivers. Thanks to the red flag the Ferrari mechanics were able to fix Alonso´s car although there were still some issues with the steering. Bottas changed to full wets at the end of the session but it didn´t prevent the Finn from being knocked out of the top ten. The FW36 simply loses performance when the conditions get wet! No matter which tyre choice the team made, both drivers suffered from lack of grip and they had no chance to make it into the Q3. In Q2 there was an incident where Bottas was on his out lap and Red Bull´s Ricciardo came from behind and tried to get past the Finn because the Australian was trying to set a lap time. This was a very unlucky event as Bottas didn´t know if Ricciardo was setting a lap time or not and Bottas´s radio didn´t work so the team was unable to tell him that Ricciardo was coming! And despite of this incident Ricciardo was able to get into Q3 whilst Bottas wasn´t. However, Bottas was handed a 3-place grid penalty for impeding Ricciardo and will start from P18 tomorrow...
When Q3 got underway the conditions were still so wet that the full wets was the right tyre choice. I had expected either one of the Mercedes drivers to take pole with a 1-second gap over the closest rival so in that regard the final session was a surprise. Hamilton did conquer pole for the second time in a row this season but Sebastian managed to make it up to P2 and the German was only 55 thousandths of a second off Hamilton! Red Bull really seems to have a stunningly fast car! Wow, what a drive from Sebastian today! Rosberg was 3rd fastest and Alonso completed the second row in spite of the steering issues. Ricciardo qualified 5th and Kimi 6th. Hulkenberg became 7th, Magnussen 8th, Vergne 9th and Button 10th. McLaren faced some serious technical difficulties already in the final practice session in the morning so they were struggling in the qualifying as well.
The weather forecast says that there should be only 20 % chance of rain in the race tomorrow! I really hope it will be a dry race! Kimi has been quicker than his team-mate in dry conditions all weekend so I´d love to see what the Iceman is capable of on the dry track. It seems that the team has finally been able to find the right set-up for Kimi´s car and the braking problems which we saw at Melbourne are only a distant memory. I believe in Ferrari´s reliability so I´m confident Kimi will score some valuable points tomorrow. I know Sebastian is extremely hungry for victory but I´m so so afraid that some kind of reliability issues will come up, sooner or later... Or issues with the fuel flow sensors or some other technical stuff. I know Bottas will show some glamorous overtaking tomorrow. And Williams have a clear advantage in terms of straight line speed: the RB10 is 20 km/h slower on the straights than the FW36! I´m sure we´ll see a highly entertaining race tomorrow!
P.S. Yesterday a journalist from a local newspaper came to interview me about my Formula 1 blog. The passion for Formula 1 goes so deep that it´s likely beyond any existing words but I´m eagerly looking forward to next Tuesday when I´ll get to read what the journalist has actually written about me and my blog ;)
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