F1 Quals: Great Britain 2014

Silverstone, the home of the Grand Prix of Great Britain, is found in County Northamptonshire, almost central to most of "southern England."  Terrain is perfect for the location's original purpose, that of a WWII airbase... flat and more flat, with wind and more wind!  It's long been said that Silverstone has its own microclimate, and if you ever needed proof of that, today's Qual session provided all you could ever want.  Let's take a look at the results:

Pos	Driver	Team	Q1	Q2	Q3
1	Nico Rosberg	Mercedes	1:40.380	1:35.179	1:35.766
2	4Time Vettel	Red Bull Racing-Renault	1:45.086	1:36.410	1:37.386
3	Jenson Button	McLaren-Mercedes	1:44.425	1:36.579	1:38.200
4	Nico Hulkenberg	Force India-Mercedes	1:41.271	1:37.112	1:38.329
5	Kevin Magnussen	McLaren-Mercedes	1:42.507	1:37.370	1:38.417
6	Whiner Hamilton	Mercedes	1:41.058	1:34.870	1:39.232
7	Sergio Perez	Force India-Mercedes	1:42.146	1:37.350	1:40.457
8	Daniel Ricciardo	Red Bull Racing-Renault	1:44.710	1:38.166	1:40.606
9	Kid Kvyat	STR-Renault	1:41.032	1:36.813	1:40.707
10	Jules Vergne	STR-Renault	1:43.040	1:37.800	1:40.855
11	Lettuce Grosjean	Lotus-Renault	1:43.121	1:38.496
12	Jules Bianchi	Marussia-Ferrari	1:41.169	1:38.709
13	Max Chilton	Marussia-Ferrari	1:42.082	1:39.800
14	Esteban!	Sauber-Ferrari	1:43.285	1:40.912
15	Crashtor Maldozer	Lotus-Renault	1:43.892	1:44.018
16	Adrian F'n Sutil	Sauber-Ferrari	1:42.603	No time
17	Valtteri Bottas	Williams-Mercedes	1:45.318
18	Felipe Massa	Williams-Mercedes	1:45.695
19	HWMNBN	Ferrari	1:45.935
20	Kimi Räikkönen	Ferrari	1:46.684
21	Marcus Ericsson	?-Renault	1:49.421
22	Gandalf Kobayashi	?-Renault	1:49.625
	Q1 107% Time		1:47.406

In Q1, the session started on a damp track, which dried out in just the right way to confuse and confound the teams.  Teams that gambled on the call to switch to slicks early managed to turn a hot lap before the rains came back.  Teams that didn't quite change as quickly lost out.  This resulted in Williams and Ferrari, cars that you would expect to see up in the top 10, being eliminated early.  This also gave us the rare occurrence of Marussia making it into Q2.

Q2 also started in the wet but with a drying track.  The difference was that this time, it didn't rain again, nobody was caught by the weather conditions, and the Marussias were three seconds behind the polesitter.  Reality, it is a cruel wench at times.

Finally, Q3 gave us both wet and dry at the same time.  It began to rain over the last sector of the track towards the end of the first hot laps, and didn't look to be getting any better.  Indeed, it got bad enough to force 4Time Vettel to abandon his first run to keep the car in one piece.  So everybody was in the pits, hoping it'd stop raining and get better.  Then late in the session, after the rain had moved one, most did go back out... almost too late for the Mercedes guys.  Rosberg followed provisonal polesitter Hamilton across the timing line for his hot lap with one second left.  He immediately started screaming at his teammate to speed up or get out of the way... Lewis, feeling that the track hadn't improved enough, aborted his lap early, letting Rosberg past.  As it turned out, Hamilton was dead wrong.  Fully five other drivers beat his time across the line, his teammate gaining pole by nearly three seconds.  All this drama gives us a front two rows of Mercedes-Red Bull-McLaren-Force India... not exactly what most would have predicted.

So a scrambled field with fast cars at either end of the grid... should prove interesting for the predicted dry racetrack on Sunday.  We'll see you then!

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:20 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
Post contains 585 words, total size 17 kb.