Nico Rosberg has beaten Lewis Hamilton to pole position at the German Grand Prix for a Mercedes front row, with a Ricciardo and Verstappen Red Bull row two.
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Indeed Rosberg was comfortably quicker than Hamilton, with his best lap of one minute and 15.614 seconds in the second session almost four tenths faster than that of his Mercedes team-mate.
His son Mick Schumacher, 17, now competing in the Italian Formula Four championship, was among the VIP guests in Hamilton’s Mercedes garage on Friday.
The Formula One juggernaut heads into yet another of it’s back-to-back weekends with the German GP set to get underway at Hockenheim.
“Personally I don’t think it is really that important, for sure entering the summer break not 43 points behind is important but it doesn’t really make”.
“It has been a good weekend”.
“It’s been a good weekend”.
“There was nothing particularly wrong today”, Hamilton said, “My final lap just didn’t work out”. I didn’t lock up. “It was subtle and didn’t lose any time”.
Both Mercedes switched to supersofts for Q2, and Hamilton again headed Rosberg, 1m 14.748s to 1m 14.839s.
“So I had fuel for three laps so that was some more time in hand there”.
“Saying that, we were very quick on Friday in Hungary, but then on Saturday and Sunday everyone else was very close”. I said yesterday if we could be within half a second that’s not a bad day in qualifying.
“We might have different tires available for us for the race and hopefully that makes it interesting”, Ricciardo said. The Ferrari duo of Kimi Raikkonen and Sebastian Vettel were fourth and fifth respectively with Max Verstappen sixth in the other Red Bull.
This meant that the top ten shootout included both Mercedes, both Red Bulls, the two Ferraris – though Vettel only went through in ninth – and both Williams and Force India cars, all four of them powered by Mercedes.
The top 10 drivers had 12 minutes to fight it out for the top 10 places on the grid. Ferrari leads the manufacturer category with a record 22 wins over second placed Mercedes-Williams tie with 9 wins. I was 0.2secs up on the lap and I just didn’t finish it. The Briton’s team mate Fernando Alonso was 14th, giving him a share of row seven with compatriot and Toro Rosso driver Carlos Sainz.
Palmer ultimately qualified 16th, but will start one place higher on the grid after Grosjean was handed a five-place penalty for an unscheduled gearbox change.
Toro Rosso’s Daniil Kvyat was the surprise casualty in Q1, finishing a lowly 19th, 0.240secs off progressing and 0.559 secs slower than team-mate Sainz.
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It was fitting, perhaps, Enerson was behind Rahal and then was sat next to Scott Dixon in the day end press conference because Rahal also starred as a teenager in his first season in open-wheel – 2007 in Champ Car – while Dixon became IndyCar’s then-youngest victor at age 20 in his first season in CART in 2001… before Rahal beat that in 2008 at age 19.
