Abu Dhabi GP 2013 - QF

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The only driver capable of getting near the Red Bulls seems to be GRO; the sister Lotus in RAI’s hands was the best chassis managing tyres on long runs, but in general VET looks unstoppable in every area: prime or option compounds, one-lap pace or long run simulations. Not only is the RB9 far superior to anything else, the four-times World Champion is comfortably quicker than teammate WEB.

P1- GRO (1.44.241) HAM  VET  WEB  ROS  RAI  DIR  BUT  MAL  PER (ALO 12, MAS 17)

P2- VET (1.41.335) WEB  HAM  RAI  ROS  PER  BUT  ALO  HUL  MAS

Pirelli chose the same compounds as last week’s Indian GP: medium (prime) soft (option). Although the excessive wear from last Sunday is not apparent in Abu Dhabi, the question remains how the temperature dropping 15 degrees from the start of the race to the sun going down will affect their performance.

In pure one-lap speed HAM was spectacular closing to within 0.3 secs. of VET, but the Mercedes driver was 1 second slower on the long runs on the options and at least 1,5 seconds slower on the primes. GRO had a brake failure early in P2 that sidelined him most of the session, but there are other problems creating tension in the Lotus team with RAI arriving late to Abu Dhabi and now the popular Finn is considering to skip the last 2 races of the season if he doesn’t get his overdue salary.

Ferrari is struggling with lack of traction coming off the many stop-and-go corners of sector 3, no only they are not in contention to fight Lotus and Mercedes but now looks that McLaren could be ahead of them too.  Both BUT and PER had chosen to set up their cars with very low downforce to get maximum speed on the 2 straights (one of the these the second longest in F1) for good times in sectors 1 & 2 sacrificing corner speed in the slow sector 3. This approach is working quite well as both MP4-28s are contentedly in the top 10.

It’s time for the CFA experts to get to work. After 16 QF sessions our best marks are 17 points for Manbos & Tim, 16 for yours truly, the next 4 members are 4 points behind (Ricky, Fredrik, Santiago & Uwe)

Cato  - VET  HAM  WEB

Good luck!

 

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