Ladies and Gentlemen,

One small mistake and ROS beat HAM for pole after the ‘08 Champ had dominated every practice session. The surprise this time came from RIC out-qualifying the much powerful Williams and Force Indias in 3rd place and full 8 positions ahead of teammate VET. The World Champion didn’t even make it to Q3. Great battle between BOT and PER for 4th & 5th to confirm their podium potential. RAI had the better of the 2 Ferraris as ALO kept losing top speed in the straights. McLaren with both cars and MAS’s Williams completed the top 10. It was the first QF dry session of the year and by the looks of it the new format has been a great improvement over the past, drivers had to push harder in both Q2 & Q3, no more tyre saving games.

In CFA competition five daring members outsmart the rest by reversing the Mercedes order, and no, nobody expected a Red Bull in 3rd. So 2 valuable points to Rodrigo,Tim & Uwe and the two rookies Hector & Iain. Big zero for the rest of us.

The grid for tomorrow - RIC will take a 10 place penalty for unsafe release during the Malaysia GP and will start 13th promoting Red Bull partner VET to 10th.

ROS  HAM  BOT  PER  RAI  BUT  MAS  MAG  ALO  VET

The race now doesn’t look so bad after all, the battles HAM vs ROS, and BOT vs PER heading the chasing group are going to be fierce. Worrying factors are 3: this is the most heavy fuel consumption track in the calendar (disadvantage Ferrari); tyre graining (although the lower evening temperatures will mitigate this problem) and reliability: this will be the 3rd race straight for the V6 engines.

Strategy for the 57 laps will most likely be a 2 stop soft/soft/med.  The options have the same degradation issues as the primes but are more regular and almost a second faster. On Friday’s long simulation runs with high fuel load on softs the surprising best car after the Mercedes were the Force Indias. PER was very consistent lapping 12 lap stints 0.8s behind Merc and 3 tenths faster than Red Bull and half a second better than Ferrari. Williams is not showing its cards, I couldn’t any find comparative data, and as they say, they test enough in pre-season at this venue and prefer to save their engines…

The polesitter has won 4 of 9 races in Sakhir; ALO has the more wins with 3.

Another big challenge await us, it’s going to be a long and difficult race. Let’s see who’s got the best crystal ball of all of us!

Cato - HAM ROS PER BUT RAI ALO