"Cato Batista" 24/08/2015 14:02:34 ID #799

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Sixth straight pole by HAM, his 10th in 11 races this year. His best lap in Q3 was almost half a second faster than ROS in second place. But behind the silver cars sitting in front row there’s an exciting GP brewing up with the most competitive starting grid of the season.

Many surprises in the top 10 starting with BOT in third, albeit a huge 1.3 seconds away from the dominant Mercedes, his Williams only 24 thousands ahead of GRO and the Lotus only 38 thousands in front of PER’s Force India, who in turn was 40 thousands ahead of RIC who’s Red Bull beat MAS’s Williams by 46 thousands. That’s 14 hundredths of a second between 3rd and 7th! The second Lotus of MAL was 8th ahead of VET’s Ferrari, who’s got nothing to blame but himself for his disappointing P9. In such a tight timesheet a mistake late in his hot lap will probably cost him any chance of winning the race.  “I went in a bit too deep, had a very poor exit and lost quite a lot of time, two tenths, not enough to go P3, but enough to be higher than P9” he admitted afterwards. It was worst for RAI in the other scarlet car, his SF15-T broke down in Q2 and the popular Finn will start in P14. Last of the shootout was SAI in the Toro Rosso.

In CFA QF results we did pretty poorly, 8 of us collected double points with the Mercedes drivers as BOT surprised us all in third place.

The final grid for tomorrow:

Several drivers had to take grid penalties for either engine or gearbox changes, but nobody even close McLaren with a total of 55 grid position penalties between its 2 drivers! They knew they had to change several components heading up to this race and had to start last anyways so they decided to utilize more of the development ‘tokens’ and take all the penalties at the same race. GRO had a gearbox replacement dropping from 4th to 9th and VER taking on his 5th engine dropping to last just ahead of the McLarens.

HAM ROS  BOT PER RIC MAS MAL VET GRO SAI

The tyre choice for the 44-lap race is medium/white & soft/yellow. Spa is the longest (7k) and fastest (230 kph average) circuit in F1 with 70% on the lap under full throttle. The pole sitter has won only 5 of the last 13 races; Red Bull has won the last 2, 3 of the last 4; Mercedes has taken 22 straight poles, just 2 short of Williams record from the 90s, but last time in Hungary was the end of their 28-run of consecutive podium finishes. From the current group of drivers Kimi has the best Spa record with 4 victories.

And here comes the best part: to forecast tomorrow’s race based on the most challenging grid order we’d had all year. If you have a heart condition you might not want to check the CFA standings as they stand right now. Let me just say that the leader has 5 pursuers tied one point behind!! To make things more interesting the unpredictable Ardennes forest weather is showing 50% chance of rain by about the middle of the race, like if we needed more complications. One thing's for sure, the Championship will get a big shake up tomorrow...

Here goes my lottery ticket: Cato - HAM ROS BOT VET RIC PER

Enjoy the racing at the magnificent Spa, and good luck!