Monaco GP 2013 - Preview, First day of practice

Monaco GP 2013 - Preview, First day of practice

"Cato Batista" 23/05/2013 23:15:01 ID #423

Ladies and Gentlemen,

As you may remember the Monaco GP has its own particular timetable. Free Practice Sessions FP1 & FP2 take place today Thursday and there are no activities tomorrow Friday. So you’ll have all day today and tomorrow to think carefully about your QF picks.

Instead of our regular preview with all the relevant gossip since the last race, we will jump straight into what’s transpired after the first day of lapping around the tight streets of the Principality.

After 3 straight poles Mercedes continues to be the fastest single-lap machine out there, and that will be the most intriguing question for this race: if they can conquer the critical front row, would they be able to hold the pack at bay for the entire race distance?

Rosberg was fastest on both sessions but Ferrari is just as quick, Alonso missing the top spot by 87 thousands of a second. In fact, only Grosjean’s Lotus in P2 was able to break into the top positions held by Mercedes & Ferrari. Red Bull has admitted that they don’t have the qualifying pace to match Mercedes, the best they could do was Webber in 5th in the afternoon session 6 ½ tenths behind Rosberg. The RB7s can’t find the right set-up for the (prime) red super-soft tires. The ‘option’ Pirelli is the yellow-soft (no medium or hard compound for this race)

The top 10 today:

P1- ROS (1.16.195) ALO GRO MAS HAM MAL WEB BUT PER VET

P2 – ROS (1.14.759) HAM ALO MAS WEB RAI GRO BUT VET DIR

I need your attention for an important issue: our resident IT magician Manbos has changed our Web hosting to a new provider (he's always looking to improve), everything went well after several days of testing but just yesterday there have been a few glitches with the new hosting and there is a concern that we might hit some problems when posting our picks. I want to ask you to try to see if you can get your selections in the web as we regularly do and if you find any problems please send them to me and/or Santiago. As he does every time, Santiago keeps running the old ‘analog’ method (entries by hand) that could be our primary option for the weekend. If you have the time, please enter your submissions as early as you can to test the system, you can always change before QF Saturday morning Monaco time. Your cooperation will be appreciated.