The conditions at the Shanghai International Circuit were perfect today. Dry track and hot weather: +28 degrees Celsius and no sign of rain! In spite of the perfect conditions all the teams stayed in their garages waiting very long before going out because once again it was all about saving tyres! Q1 held a nasty surprise as the Finnish Williams driver Valtteri Bottas was knocked out already in the first session! He made only one flying lap which wasn´t clean and the Finn qualified 17th. It was a huge disappointment as his Venezuelan team-mate Maldonado managed to grab P13 in Q1. Sauber´s Gutierrez didn´t make his way through to Q2, either.
Other surprises followed when Q2 got underway. Something unbelievable happened to the Australian Red Bull driver after his first attempt: he run out of gas and he had to leave his RB9 on the grass! Webber´s qualifying was over and he was in P14. How can things like this happen in a top team like Red Bull? This incident certainly won´t help decreasing people´s talks about all kinds of "conspiracy theories" going on at Red Bull. But if I´m asked I would say that the huge fuss around the team order incident at Malaysia most certainly has affected the team in some way. The relationship between the drivers clearly isn´t working and when there´s a lot of negativity in the air people are also more vulnerable to make mistakes... There might be some further punishments for Webber if there isn´t enough fuel in Webber´s car for a fuel sample... As if P14 wasn´t punishment hard enough for the mistake made by the team! The most positive surprise in Q2 was the fact that Toro Rosso´s Ricciardo made it in top ten being 9th fastest! Very impressive work from the young Australian :)
Q3 was interesting indeed as we saw different tactics from different teams. The final session was all about waiting for "the right moment" to go out. Vettel in his RB9 was the only driver to go out at the beginning of the final session. He was on the soft tyres but aborted his flying lap and came in. When there were about 3 minutes left in the clock everyone except Hulkenberg in his Sauber headed out. Tyre-wise this was very interesting: Vettel and Button had the hard tyres on whilst all the others were on softs! Hamilton was the fastest man today and grabbed his very first pole for Mercedes. There seems to be something magical about Shanghai and Mercedes as this was Mercedes´s second consecutive pole under the Chinese sun! The Iceman was utterly on fire today and Kimi made it on the front row! Absolutely breath-taking performance from the Finn who got the maximum out of his E21 today. Alonso in his Ferrari was 3rd and Nico in Mercedes completed the second row followed by Massa 5th and Grosjean 6th. Ricciardo will start from the impressive P7 tomorrow. Button and Vettel on the prime tyres didn´t set a time in the final session (Seb went wide in his last attempt) so it´ll be P8 and P9 for them.
The tyre choices will certainly make tomorrow´s race unpredictable and action-packed! There was a story on a Finnish F1 site that a boa had predicted Kimi to win on Sunday... Doesn´t sound bad at all! I believe that both Mercedes and Ferrari will face harder tyre degradation than their rivals and knowing that Lotus probably have the chance to make one pit stop less than their opponents make Kimi´s situation look extremely good! Though Button and Vettel on the prime tyres will have their say in the battle for podium places -at least if they don´t lose too many positions at the start! I´m sure tomorrow´s race won´t be lacking entertainment. I have a feeling that the Iceman will be stamping his authority all over Shanghai tomorrow. Kimi and the E21 seems to be a perfect combination. One thing I´m sure about as well: we won´t see any team orders tomorrow! Tomorrow will be all about racing till the chequered flag!
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