I'm sitting at my grandma's cottage by a lake and the scenery couldn't be any better! I'm enjoying the warm evening sun and what would be more perfect activity than write about Formula 1 racing! (Though I have to admit that I'm not feeling too perky at the moment as I stayed up pretty late last night and yes, some alcohol was involved ;-) )
Luckily the weather in Germany was warm and sunny when qualifying got underway. Q1 showed once again that Williams has huge amount of work to do! Both cars were eliminated from Q2. Bottas was some thousandths of a second faster than his team-mate but that really isn't much of a comfort. Kimi's pace seemed excellent so I was convinced that Lotus would be capable of challenging both Red Bull and Mercedes for the places on the first two rows.
Q2 held a major surprise as Mercedes made a tactical mistake with Nico Rosberg. At the beginning of the second session Nico had initially been 3rd fastest. At the end of the session the team made the call not to send Nico out for the second run as they thought his time was fast enough to ensure the place among the top ten. That wasn't, however, the case and Nico was out of Q3! Without the mistake the German would definitely have been out there to fight for pole! A valuable lession for Mercedes that you can't take anything for granted in Formula 1 and an arrogant attitude doesn't pay off! Surprisingly also both Force Indias were eliminated from the final session. Ricciardo's boost seems to continue as the Australian made his way through to Q3 whilst his team-mate Vergne failed to deliver. Button managed to make it among the ten fastest as well so the Briton showed that though McLaren is a difficult car to drive the situation still isn't hopeless.
Q3 was about tyre tactics. Both Lotus and Red Bull chose to make two runs on the soft tyres. Ferrari instead chose a different strategy. Both Massa and Alonso came out once at the end of the session and the Ferrari duo had the hard tyres on. So it was obvious that they had no chance to fight for pole as there's about one-second difference in terms of lap times between the tyre compounds. Hamilton was once again the fastest man on the track today. It starts to be already a bit annoying that the pole setter always seems to be either one of the silver arrows ;-) Sebastian made it on the front row which made me extremely happy. Initially it seemed that Kimi at the wheel of his E21 could make it among the top three but at the closing stages Webber was able to snatch P3 and Kimi was left in P4 followed by his team-mate Grosjean. Ricciardo in his Toro Rosso took excellent 6th place. Massa and Alonso were in P7 and P8 with the different tyre strategy. Button and Hulkenberg didn't set a lap time in Q3 so they're allowed go choose their tyres for tomorrow's race.
Pirelli has brought new rear tyres to Germany which has been done to ensure that the chaos seen at Silverstone won't happen again. And there hasn't been any tyre blowouts during this GP weekend so far so everything is looking good in terms of the tyres. The weather is expected to stay dry and pretty warm so I'm sure Kimi will be out there to hunt the victory! Nothing would be lovelier than to see a tight fight for victory between Kimi and Sebastian!
The sun is setting and I'm sitting outside writing this blog post on my mobile phone. I usually write on my laptop so please excuse me if this text looks odd in some way. But I'll be at home by the time that the lights go out so I'll be back at my computer tomorrow when it's time to write about the race!
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