Hamilton pips Rosberg in qualifying
October 11, 2014
Lewis Hamilton's pole position time at the Sochi Autodrom held on Saturday, despite a last-gasp effort from Williams' Valtteri Bottas that came unstuck in the final two corners.
Bottas' time was only good enough for third on the grid in the end, with Hamilton's Mercedes teammate and championship rival Nico Rosberg set to start the race in second on Sunday. Hamilton leads Rosberg by just 10 points in the drivers' championship.
"There are only four races left, every one of them is important," Rosberg said after the session. "But Lewis was quicker all weekend - that's the way it is sometimes, I have to accept it. Anything's still possible in the race."
Hamilton has won the last three Grands Prix, while Rosberg, who led the standings for most of the season, has not stood atop the winners' podium since his home race in Germany in July.
Jenson Button qualified fourth for McLaren, while Daniil Kvyat impressed at his home event, putting his Toro Rosso surprisingly high on the grid in fifth.
Vettel misses top 10
Sebastian Vettel, whose seat at Red Bull will be taken by Kvyat for the 2015 season, had rather less joy blasting around the Winter Olympic village. The reigning champion could only manage 11th fastest, missing out on the top 10 shootout for pole position, but he will start Sunday's race in tenth owing to a grid penalty for McLaren's Kevin Magnussen - the sixth-fastest driver on Saturday.
"We knew that it would be difficult here. Though we had expected a little bit more than this, and couldn't deliver," Vettel, whose teammate Daniel Ricciardo qualified seventh, said after the difficult qualifying.
With Vettel's absence, Rosberg was the only German driver involved in the final push for pole position. Force India's Nico Hülkenberg qualified 12th but will be relegated five places on Sunday's grid for making a gearbox change, while Adrian Sutil was the 15th-fastest of the 21 cars in action.
The second Marussia car, usually belonging to Jules Bianchi, who was severely injured in the last round at Suzuka in Japan, is not running in Sochi - explaining the 21-car field. The entire grid is racing with well-wishes for the stricken Frenchman on their helmets.
From Russia with roubles
Formula One, always on the lookout for a questionable government with a healthy budget to spend on international PR, is racing in Russia for the first time ever this year. As political and business F1 journalist Dieter Rencken wrote in his column for Autosport magazine this week, the commercial operator of the series, Formula One Management, "has around 50 million extremely good reasons to stage the Russian Grand Prix."
The new track is designed by the German, Aachen-based architectural company led by Hermann Tilke, who has overseen the construction of more than half a dozen of F1's new circuits around the world. Tilke, in an interview on Sky Sports Germany before qualifying, estimated the cost of developing the track at "between 150 and 200 million euros," but conceded that it was difficult to define which costs were part of the F1 project and which should be attributed to the Winter Olympics held earlier in the year.
F1 will also travel to Baku in Azerbiajan for the first time in 2015.