Ladies and Gentlemen,

Ferrari and Red Bull had taken the 4 top spots in the grid pushing Mercedes to the third row. It was widely believed the Silver Arrows were ‘sandbagging’, not showing their cards through all practice sessions, but for the first time since last season they had been positively outpaced.

VET lapped the Ferrari over half a second clear of second place RIC, 8 and 9 tenths over teammate RAI and KVY, and a huge second and a half over Lewis & Nico. Both Williams made it to Q3 with BOT in  7th and MAS 9th split by teenager VER, with GRO’s Lotus completing the top 10. Rookie SAI had a big accident (he’s OK) stopping short Q2 and leaving out of the shoot out both Force Indias and ALO in the McLaren, although both HUL and PER admitted they probably didn’t have the pace to take on the Lotus or the Williams.

Our QF scores were a disaster, but I guess we saw it coming. Nobody was even close to decipher the VET-RIC-RAI winning combination, the best we’d got was single marks for 10 of us with VET (7) and RIC (3). With a total of 10 points this was officially our worst QF of the season. Let’s blame Mercedes.

The grid for tomorrow:

VET RIC RAI KVY HAM ROS BOT VER MAS GRO

Pole sitter VET was surprised by his margin at the front, but he’s already keeping an eye on his mirrors for the Silver cars: "I will not rule them out tomorrow -he said. It's not the easiest place to overtake but if you have the pace, you can come through." Singapore is never a ‘normal’ race, it’s exhausting physically, extremely hard on the equipment -tyres particularly- and long, very long, humid and hot. It’s always a race of attrition, accidents, it is the longest on the calendar in terms of time taken to complete, ranging from between one hour and 56 minutes to the time limit

of two hours. In it’s 7 editions only World Champions had taken the spoils of victory: VET 3 times, ALO & HAM 2 each. The race has been won from the pole in 5 occasions. The strategy for the 61 laps is based on making the right call when the Safety Car intervenes. And it will appear, as it has done at least once in every edition of this GP. Expect all kinds of strategies, and many surprises...

If we thought QF was hard just wait for the race tomorrow, the only thing I can predict are some serious corrective changes in the championship standings. If normally is very hard to make a 2 or 3 point ground on the leaderboard, tomorrow we are set for either winning big ...or losing big! We’ll have to work hard for each one of the top 6 places, this looks like a wide open race.

I’ve got my ticket:

Cato - VET  RIC  HAM  RAI ROS  ALO

You are next.

Enjoy, good luck!