Nov 4, 2011
The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix will be staged for only the third time this weekend and this will be the first time in its history that the Yas Marina Circuit does not host the final race of the season. Last year, the most spectacular facility on the calendar saw a nail biting finish to the World Championship, with Sebastian Vettel taking the title, despite never having led the Drivers’ classification prior to that final race. The German is in fact the only winner of this event and, the way 2011 has gone, you would not get good odds against the youngster taking an Abu Dhabi hat-trick on Sunday.
We now have a night race in Singapore, a late afternoon race in Melbourne and Yas Marina boasts the novelty of staging the only dusk race on the calendar. It doesn’t have the wow factor of Singapore, but it does mean the race is on at a more convenient time of day for its biggest audience back in Europe. The circuit is actually the largest floodlit permanent sports venue in the world. The other plus point of starting a race at five in the afternoon is that it avoids the hottest part of the day, thus making working conditions slightly more bearable. Technically it’s interesting in that the track temperature actually drops during the course of the race rather than rise, which is the norm at other tracks. The first sector is fast and flowing and the drivers like it, then after that there are plenty of much slower corners which are less challenging, but then it was designed by Hermann Tilke to be a sort of Arabian Monaco so maybe that explains all the slow turns. Just like Monaco, the 2010 race showed that overtaking is very difficult, so it will be interesting to see if this year’s implementation of DRS, KERS and Pirelli tyres will change that.
Scuderia Toro Rosso has scored points at every (ok, let’s say both!) Abu Dhabi Grands Prix, as Sebastien Buemi came home eighth in 2009 and Jaime Alguersuari was ninth last year. On current form, those are the positions that could realistically be available to us next Sunday, unless the front running teams face unexpected problems. While the actual World Championship titles have already been decided in favour of Red Bull Racing and Vettel, Scuderia Toro Rosso is still involved in the nail-biting final stages of a late surge that could see us move up the order in the Constructors’ championship. It’s going to be a long stay at Yas Marina, as we have the Young Driver test running there from the Tuesday to Thursday after the Grand Prix. We will be running Kevin Ceccon and Stefano Coletti and you can read more about that in our press release.
Credit: Scuderia Toro Rosso (www.scuderiatororosso.com)
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