"Cato Batista" 17/09/2016 22:51:54 ID #1010

Ladies and Gentlemen,

This was probably the closest QF session we’d had, in the end Mercedes imposed their superior horsepower over Red Bull’s better handling for ROS to take pole.”It was one of the 3 best laps of my life” declared Nico afterwards, but in all fairness he‘s had a much better weekend than teammate Lewis who’s been struggling with mechanical issues and lack of track time to dial the car to his liking. Despite the 7-tenth deficit HAM will start 3rd in between the Red Bull cars. RIC has been generaly slower than VER but as usual he used all his racecraft in his last attempt to grab second. Ferrari look poised for a top-3 finish but RAI lost grip in his last flyer (“we don’t know why” -he said) to end 5th, but the other red car will start 22nd and last as VET suffered a broken rear suspension in the Q1-out lap and the team didn't have enough time to make repairs. The best 4th team by far this weekend is Toro Rosso, although more than half a second behind the top 3 three but comfortable sitting with both SRT11 in 6th and 7th, SAI particularly impressive from the go. Force India is the next best with HUL ahead of PER in all sessions but the Mexican will lose 8 places from his 10th for a double grid penalty for ignoring yellow flags in his last Q2 run. That will promote BOT’s Williams to the fifth row. McLaren keeps showing solid development by advancing once more to the shootout, but you wonder if this has more to do his ALO’s skills than car improvement. Still, great to see McLaren moving up the grid..

Looking at our poor scores you can tell how competitive this QF was: more than half of us didn’t get a single point, and that includes the 3 championship leaders. The best we did today was 2 points for Maria, Alberto, Erik and Santiago. Is the race tomorrow going to be as difficult to predict? could be…

The grid for tomorrow:

ROS RIC  HAM VER  RAI SAI  KVY HUL  ALO BOT

Red Bull Horner said that “the only chance to beat Mercedes is to do something different”, and starting the race in super-softs could just be the key to win tomorrow. As all the top qualifiers will line up in the ultra-soft compound, both Red Bull will shod super-softs and have a new set of each compound ready to be used in the race, opening up a much versatile strategy to react to the ‘expected surprises’ (i.e. Safety Car) that will happen during the 61 race-lap. Default-call is a 2 stopper using super-softs for the last 2 stints, particularly for the drivers that made it to Q3 using all their purple ultra-soft allocation already (except Red Bull).

The polesitter has won 7 of the 8 Singapore GPs. VET has won 4 times, he’s always finished in the top 5. This is indeed a unique Grand Prix, it’s the most physically demanding race in the calendar: 24 corners without respite, narrow, bumpy, hot, very long -it always lasted between 1h 56m and the 2-hour limit mark-, it’s an enormous endurance challenge and as a result there has been at least one Safety Car intervention in every race so far.

And to make our forecasting duties even more complex, the run from the start to the first corner is only 285 metres, and race starts had been Mercedes weakness of lately…

Time to pull out all your lucky charms - Cato- RIC HAM RAI ROS SAI ALO

Let’s see yours

Enjoy, this could be a good one.