Ladies and Gentlemen,

Things went as expected with the silver cars taking the front row, but it wasn’t that easy for Lewis as Nico found an ideal setup for his W05 to give his teammate a hard battle for the pole. In the end HAM carried his momentum to grab his 4th pole of the year (3rd in a row) with a lap under the 1m26s barrier. Mechanical problems hit VET yet again in his opening Q3 lap relegating him to last of the top 10. Meanwhile RIC was best of the rest in 3rd 7 tenths+ behind ROS and 1 full second behind HAM. Both Ferraris continue their recalcitrant single-lap QF form, Kimi beat Fernando by a fraction but they both were beaten by BOT in the Williams and the resurgent Lotus in GRO’s hands (MAL’s ended up against the wall…) BUT was the only McLaren to make it to the shoot out just ahead of the second Williams of MAS. Both Force Indias were left out of Q3 (PER 11th & HUL 12th) and even with their great race-trim full load consistency they will struggle to make places in this difficult-to-pass circuit.

I hope you enjoyed the all-you-can-eat CFA qualifying banquet. We scored a record-breaking nine QF plenums: Maria, Carlos, Fernando, Fredrik, Ricky, Santiago, Tim, Uwe and I pocketed 4 points thanks to the HAM-ROS-RIC combo. We must thank VET’s Red Bull problems because the German had the car to beat his teammate by looking at his sector times... It’s all good though!

The grid for tomorrow:

HAM  ROS  RIC  BOT  GRO  RAI  ALO  BUT  MAS  VET

Several teams are saying that Pirelli brought a ‘very conservative’ compound selection to Spain -hard/orange & med/white- but still tyre wear is serious concern as we saw the top runners saving sets of options in Q1 & Q2 (Mercedes particularly). Last year ALO won in the Ferrari with 4 stops!. This year expect 3 stops for the top guys for the 66 laps with 2-stops as the alternative. Even with 2 DRS zones remember this is a very difficult track to find a place to overtake.

The polesitter has won 10 of the last Spanish GPs, 17 of 23 overall. Except a couple of times (ALO from fith in 2013) the winner always comes from the front row. There had been 7 different winners in the last 8 editions: HAM & ROS had never won here.

Se here go again: Cato HAM ROS RIC ALO RAI BOT

You are next!

Enjoy