Nov 26, 2011
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Jaime Alguersuari and Sébastien Buemi will start tomorrow’s Brazilian Grand Prix, the nineteenth and final round of the championship, alongside one another on the seventh row of the Interlagos grid, with the Spaniard in 13th place, one better and a couple of tenths of a second quicker than the Swiss driver.
Sébastien seems to be getting more than his fair share of bad luck in recent races and he didn’t set a time in the final hour of free practice in the morning. A hydraulic problem sidelined him for the rest of the session, but the two cars were ready to go when it was time for qualifying. Both drivers tackled Q1 by doing four timed laps on the Medium tyres and another four on the Softs and Jaime was tenth at the end of the first part of the session, with Séb sixteenth. In between the two runs, the wind began to whip around the Interlagos track and the forecast showed it was raining just two kilometres away. A sense of urgency swept down pit lane as the two Toro Rosso men went out again to do shorter runs on the Soft tyre in Q2. The fact that the mid-field teams have been very close all season long was exaggerated by the short lap here, so that the tiniest of margins decided the order.
As it turned out, the rain never materialised, but it seems it will tomorrow afternoon and, as Jaime said after the session, Brazilian rain is usually heavy. Even in the dry, having the likes of Petrov and the two Saubers behind us would be cause for a bit of nail biting as the red lights go out, but in the rain…Of course, the most positive aspect of today is that, despite our difficulties, our rivals for seventh place in the Constructors’ Championship start behind us, with Kobayashi sixteenth and Perez seventeenth. However, just finishing ahead of them is not enough, we need to score two more points than they do tomorrow, because if we only get one point to equal their total, the Swiss team takes the position by virtue of some better placings than us. The Interlagos track often delivers a real thriller of a race and there’s no reason to expect anything less tomorrow. In the wet anything can happen, while in the dry, we could see more pit stops than of late, because of relatively high tyre degradation.
In case Red Bull’s dominance of the season had passed anyone by, they monopolised the front row of the grid, with Sebastian Vettel on pole ahead of Mark Webber. Row 2, features the McLaren of Jenson Button in third and Lewis Hamilton fourth, with the next row having Fernando Alonso’s Ferrari in fifth spot, inside the Mercedes of Nico Rosberg.
Credit: Scuderia Toro Rosso (www.scuderiatororosso.com)
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