Kimi Räikkönen & Sebastian Vettel

Kimi Räikkönen & Sebastian Vettel

lauantai 26. maaliskuuta 2011

Australian GP: Qualifying

The Formula 1 season 2011 is finally here! A lot of speculation concerning the pecking order of the teams took place before the first qualifying session of the year. I guess everybody expected Red Bull to be very strong and competitive  but who would have guessed that Vettel would conquer the pole position with such a superior margin to his rivals! I mean 7 tenths to the second-placed Hamilton is a huge gap! And Vettel being 8 tenths of a second faster than his team-mate surprised me. Though Australia hasn´t ever been much of a success to Webber... Although Vettel himself gave very cautious comments on him being significantly faster than his rivals, I have difficulties to find words good enough to describe the performance of the reigning world champion...

On the basis what we saw at the winter tests quite many expected Ferrari to be the strongest team to challenge Red Bull at the beginning of the season. But what happened to Alonso and Massa in the qualifying? In the Q3 Alonso was 1.4 seconds behind Vettel putting him 5th on the grid and Massa qualified 8th while both McLaren drivers Hamilton and Button were in front of the Ferrari duo. Personally I was surprised how quick the McLaren drivers were after such a difficult winter. But this was only the qualifying so we don´t know about the reliability of the new cars yet... Will Ferrari be the most reliable car as the winter tests proved? And how will McLarens perform, will there be some technical failures due to the big changes they made to the car at the last minute before the new season... I can´t wait to see how the race goes!

There were some other surprises aswell. The Japanese Kobayshi has made a positive impression on me from his very first races and he did a great job in the Sauber today qualifying 9th. His team-mate Perez put himself to the 14th place which made him the best rookie in the qualifying so Sauber seems to have improved from last season. And Buemi in Toro Rosso made a nice impression, too by making his way to the Q3!  But there were also not so nice surprises. I had expected much more from Mercedes GP, especially Schumacher who had a lot to prove after the difficult last season... But he didn´t make it to the Q3 while his team-mate Rosberg managed to take the 7th place... And what about Team Lotus? The winter tests gave some hope of improved performance compared to the midfield teams but the qualifying unfortunately crashed all those hopes! Kovalainen qualified 19th: the very familiar place from the previous season. I so much hope that they will be able to solve issues concerning the tyre temperatures so that both Kovalainen and Trulli would have better chances to fight for points!

I guess everybody is wondering how the new Pirelli tyres will perform tomorrow in the race. The drivers seem to be positively surprised after noticing that the degradation level isn´t that high what they had feared after testing. But I´m sure we´re going to see interesting pit stop strategies tomorrow! There´re predictions of at least two pit stops... It´s interesting to see if the driver´s driving style has an effect on the degradation of the tyres... And will there be any dangerous overtaking situations due to the moveable rear wing?And what about the KERS system? Soon after the qualifying it became clear that the Red Bull drivers didn´t use KERS during the qualifying! It just makes me wonder how much quicker Vettel would possibly have been if he had used the KERS system?? It´s almost scary, haha! And now there´s a lot of speculation going on about whether the KERS used in the RB7 differs from the system used in other teams´ cars so that Red Bull would have a "start-only KERS" which would be used only at the starts... I mean Red Bull absolutely can´t afford running their cars totally without the KERS system because that would make their rivals a serious threat to the Red Bulls at the start of the race. But maybe we´ll get an aswer to this question in the near future.

Vettel seems to be continuing where he left at the end of the season 2010: being dominant, astonishingly fast and being able to pull out the perfect lap at the very moment it is needed! Hopefully Kinky Kylie proves to be more reliable than its predecessor and Vettel will finish the race tomorrow without any technical problems. All I can say is that it is absolutely thrilling to see somebody drive with such talent, pace and determination! It really makes my day! Just wondering if the reigning world champion has even a clue how many people, including me, he makes so happy just by driving his car extremely fast...

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