"Cato Batista" 07/11/2014 21:30:52 ID #695

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The Mercs are comfortably ahead of the field, about 1 sec in P1 and half a sec in P2, with Nico in front of Lewis by 2 tenths. After the first day of action this looks like a repeat of Austin where the 2 Williams and RIC were the best of the rest, except that RAI somehow found a quick lap in P2 to sneak to third after he was all over the place for most of both sessions. Lap times from P1 are mostly irrelevant as the teams had to change their programs to cope with severe lack of grip presented by the brand new asphalt. Pirelli had program to bring the Hard/Medium combo but protests (particularly from a very vocal MAS) made them to change instead to Med/Soft that are now showing blistering problems in the surface’s very high temperatures.

P1 - ROS (1.12.764) HAM KVY ALO MAS Verstappen (in VER’s car) MAL RAI MAG RIC

P2 - ROS (1.12.123) HAM RAI RIC BOT MAS ALO KVY VET MAG

The new asphalt was extremely slippery and hot, many drivers had offs and spins but none as bad as Force India reserve driver Spanish Juncadella hitting the wall in PER’s car. The damage was substantial leaving the Mexican without his ride for the rest of the day. The sessions were interrupted by red flags due to cars stopping on track with mechanical issues, most notable ALO extinguisher in hand putting out the fire coming from the back of his F14T. His engine situación is very marginal now as all his 5 unit are used past their prime.

This is heading to be a Williams-Red Bull battle for the second row of the grid. BOT’s FW36 has the top numbers on the speed traps (nothing new) and has better balance than his teammate, but this is MAS home turf, he’s always fast around interlagos and his 5th time in P2 was coming from him more than car, BOT’s has a better setup than the 6 hundredths between them would suggest. And do not expect much from VET this weekend, besides some problems (“the usual bad Friday” he said) the team is clearly focusing in RIC’s car, after all the still Champion is leaving soon and the team doesn’t want him to take any relevant information with him. In contrast RIC sounds pretty upbeat even though he confesses he doesn’t like this track: "It is a short lap and ideally I like something with a few more corners. I cannot honestly say what the secret is to getting a good lap at Interlagos because I am not sure I have ever really nailed it!”. The power disadvantage of his Renault in the all-important uphill main straight of sector 3 is more than compensated by the amazing downforce-low drag of Newey’s RB10 design.

QF could be very interesting by looking at the weather forecast. By the start of the session there’s a 75 to 90% “risk of frequent moderate rain showers”. Sounds like we could have a surprise on the making. And for Sunday? very similar but decreasing to 55-80%. Another bigger surprise?

Nico has outscore Lewis 9-to-7 in the qualifying department this season, so we may as well flip a coin between these two for the pole tomorrow. Third place looks like a toss between MAS,RIC & BOT, but in reality the rain could present a chance for the risk takers to make some gains in the CFA standings. With 2 rounds left it’s time to throw caution to the wind!

CATO- (heads? tails?) ROS HAM BOT

Shoot! good luck!