Felipe Massa does it again, beating Lewis Hamilton to pole by .05 seconds, just moments after the McLaren driver had grabbed pole by a seemingly insurmountable one-third of a second.

The surprising thing is that Massa didn't really seem to have good lap going. In fact, his third sector was far from the best he'd done in Q3. Very strange, but that's F1 sometimes.

Kimi Raikkonen is third on the grid, having had a fairly quiet day, all told. Fourth was Fernando Alonso, and there's no better sign of the turmoil going down at McLaren than the fact that the team divided their pitcrew into two groups (and two pit stalls) in Q3: one for Hamilton, and the other for Alonso. There's nothing in the rules saying they CAN'T do that in quals (though they can't in the race). It just means that their stops were slower... and it avoids the backstabbing that occurred in Hungary.

Next on the grid are the two BMWs of Kubica and Heidfeld... and I've GOT to show you the photos of the two lads that I found the other day:

The rest of the grid:
7. Heikki Kovalaineninnie Finland Renault 1:28.491
8. Nico Rosberg Germany Williams-Toyota 1:28.501
9. Jarno Trulli Italy Toyota 1:28.740
10. Giancarlo Fisichella Italy Renault 1:29.322
11. Anthony Davidson Britain Super Aguri-Honda 1:28.002
12. Mark Webber Australia Red Bull-Renault 1:28.013
13. David Coulthard's Chin Britain Red Bull-Renault 1:28.100
14. Rubens Barrichello Brazil Honda 1:28.188
15. Jenson Button Britain Honda 1:28.220
16. Alexander Wurz Austria Williams-Toyota 1:28.390
17. Vitantonio Liuzzi Italy Toro Rosso-Ferrari 1:28.798
18. Ralf Schumacher Germany Toyota 1:28.809
19. Takuma Sato Japan Super Aguri-Honda 1:28.953
20. Sebastian Vettel Germany Toro Rosso-Ferrari 1:29.408
21. Adrian Sutil Germany Spyker-Ferrari 1:29.861
22. Sakon Yamamoto Japan Spyker-Ferrari 1:31.479

Special Bonus Points to SuperAguri's Ant Davidson for finishing 8th in Q1, and barely missing out on Q3. He was 8th in Q2, but three of the last four cars to record hot laps bumped him. It was SO close, and SO heartbreaking for us SA fans. I'm not sure what happened to Takuma Sato in quals; he's just fallen off the screen altogether.

But he still outqualified Sebastian "I Replaced Scott Speed" Vettel... who's yet to outqualify his teammate, Vitantonio Liuzzi, who was outqualified by Speed 7 races to 4.

Hmmm... think Toro Rosso made a mistake there?

Posted by: Wonderduck at 02:43 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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