F1 Quals: Turkey 2008!

Ho-hum, another race, another pole for Felipe Massa.  His third in a row, Massa ripped off what would be a surprisingly quick lap at the end for anybody else, but we're coming to expect that sort of thing from the Ferrari driver.  He nipped McLaren's Heikki Kovelainenninninnie for pole at the last second.  It's still the first time Heikki's been on the front row.

Heikki's teammate, Lewis Hamilton, managed to bring his steed into third on the grid, beating Kimi Raikkonnen of Ferrari out by .13 seconds, who in turn shoved Robert Kubica into 5th on his last lap of Q3.

An interesting strategy for the two RedBull drivers, who were only on track long enough to turn one hot-lap each.  Mark Webber managed 6th place, but David Coulthard's Chin couldn't get off 10th.  Still, one has to expect that they've got a bunch of fuel in the tanks, and they didn't use much of it at all, so expect them to get a longer run than might be common.  Whether it'll work or not remains to be seen.  HWMNBN, Jarno Trulli, and Nick Heidfeld, who had been having troubles coming to grips with his BMW all day, finish up the top 10.

The provisional grid:

1	Felipe Massa	Ferrari	1:25.994	1:26.192	1:27.617
2	Heikki Kovalainen	McLaren-Mercedes	1:26.736	1:26.290	1:27.808
3	Lewis Hamilton	McLaren-Mercedes	1:26.192	1:26.477	1:27.923
4	Kimi Räikkönen	Ferrari	1:26.457	1:26.050	1:27.936
5	Robert Kubica	BMW Sauber	1:26.761	1:26.129	1:28.390
6	Mark Webber	Red Bull-Renault	1:26.773	1:26.466	1:28.417
7	Fernando Alonso	Renault	1:26.836	1:26.522	1:28.422
8	Jarno Trulli	Toyota	1:26.695	1:26.822	1:28.836
9	Nick Heidfeld	BMW Sauber	1:27.107	1:26.607	1:28.882
10	David Coulthard	Red Bull-Renault	1:26.939	1:26.520	1:29.959
11	Nico Rosberg	Williams-Toyota	1:27.367	1:27.012
12	Rubens Barrichello	Honda	1:27.355	1:27.219
13	Jenson Button	Honda	1:27.428	1:27.298
14	Sebastian Vettel	STR-Ferrari	1:27.442	1:27.412
15	Timo Glock	Toyota	1:26.614	1:27.806
16	Kazuki Nakajima	Williams-Toyota	1:27.547
17	Nelsinho Piquet	Renault	1:27.568
18	Sebastien Bourdais	STR-Ferrari	1:27.621
19	Giancarlo Fisichella	Force India-Ferrari	1:27.807
20	Adrian Sutil	Force India-Ferrari	1:28.325

The track at the Istanbul Otodrom is driving much different for this race than in the past two.  Part of that, surely, is because of the lack of traction control, but a good portion of the reason is the weather.  In the past, this race has been in August and the ambient air temps have been pushing 95^o F, with the track temps well over 110^o.  Today, the temps were thirty degrees cooler, and it had rained earlier to boot.  While no rain is expected for the race, the air is supposed to be cool-ish, which is making Bridgestone very nervous: the "soft" tires they've brought to the track (actually the medium compound) aren't very good in cool air.  There's already been reports that they've suffered severe cases of graining.

So, how the teams make their tire choices might be even more important than normal on Sunday.  We'll find out...

Posted by: Wonderduck at 05:52 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 490 words, total size 11 kb.