No answers for beaten Rosberg with Hamilton and Vettel in a qualifying class of their own; McLaren take two steps forward and one back, but off-colour Kvyat struggles with expectancy
Tuesday 21 April 2015 11:56, UK
Rosberg a lost man
Having spoken in the build-up to the race of the importance of delivering the “perfect weekend”, the German couldn’t do his talking on the track when it mattered. The gap between Rosberg and his team-mate - over half a second - was the largest it has been since the opening weekend of the season.
Rosberg’s reasoning for not delivering in Q3 also smacked of a driver clutching at straws. The German said he was concentrating on preserving his tyres for the start of the race by not abusing them on the out-lap. But that should only have affected him during Q2. The German claimed that it had disrupted his rhythm in the final part of qualifying, but the reality is he had a three-lap run on used tyres to refocus himself ahead of his final timed attempt.
Put simply, the reasoning did not add up and it seemed like a desperate excuse. Just four races into the season, Rosberg looks like a beaten man who has no answers to Hamilton in his current form.
With Ferrari’s resurrection continuing to gather momentum, these are already dangerous times for the German. Unless he starts delivering, Rosberg could soon find himself relegated to Hamilton’s rear gunner rather than his championship challenger.
Only Vettel can halt Hamilton’s pole march
With the way Lewis Hamilton is going at the moment, it won’t be long before Michael Schumacher’s all-time number of pole positions will start to represent an achievable target. The Mercedes driver’s four-in-a-row pole run at the start of the new season means he now has topped qualifying on 42 occasions in F1, a tally which currently places him fourth on the all-time list behind Vettel’s on 45, Ayrton Senna on 65 and Schumacher on 68.
Of course, the great German's record remains a good couple of seasons away for now, but in more immediate matters Vettel’s 45 should be surpassed as early as the Austrian GP in June. Sunday’s Bahrain GP will represent the 22nd time that Hamilton and Vettel have shared the front-row in F1 and certainly since both men arrived on the scene in 2007 they have proved to be the sport’s standout qualifying performers.
Hamilton’s Saturday streak means he is currently hogging the headlines, but Vettel’s Saturday form shouldn’t be overlooked either given he, like his Mercedes rival, is currently enjoying a 4-0 advantage over his team-mate. In Hamilton’s hands at least, the W06 continues to enjoy a clear single-lap advantage over the Ferrari SF15-T but if the Scuderia’s improvements since Australia are anything to go by – they qualified 1.4 seconds behind Mercedes at the season-opener but were just 0.4s adrift on Saturday – then we could see a true head-to-head clash in a few races’ time.
Certainly on current form Vettel is arguably the only driver capable of preventing Hamilton from overhauling him for third place in F1’s pole roll of honour.
Daniil Kvyat is under pressure
Had Sebastian Vettel not decided six months ago that now was the moment to realise his childhood dream and join Ferrari, then Daniil Kvyat would still be driving for Toro Rosso. At the age of just 20 and in his second season of F1, the Russian would currently be characterised as a driver ‘learning his craft’ and as a result could quietly get away with the occasional ‘off’ day. Just ask Max Verstappen, the star of Shanghai, after a poor Saturday for the Dutchman in Bahrain.
However, while neither his age nor level of experience has changed since his swift promotion to Red Bull, the pressure and expectancy on Kvyat certainly has and, whatever way you want to look at it, he is currently not delivering. While hardly helped by the RB11’s reliability in his first three race weekends for the senior squad, Bahrain has proved to be difficult right from the get go. Having trailed team-mate Daniel Ricciardo on Friday, Kvyat’s P3 lasted just seven laps before he dropped his car into one of Sakhir’s many sand traps. The lack of preparation time then probably directly contributed to his surprise early demise in qualifying, when he lapped 1.1 seconds slower than the sister car in Q1 to boot.
"A scruffy start to his Red Bull career," remarked Sky F1’s Martin Brundle, adding that the young Russian was already showing signs of being a driver "under pressure". With the way the hugely-successful Red Bull young driver programme works, you’re either giving pressure or taking pressure, and with Carlos Sainz and Verstappen already making impressive marks in F1, Kvyat is quickly finding out what life’s like when the boot is on the other foot.
McLaren are progressing – but problems remain
So, McLaren-Honda’s piecemeal progress up the 2015 grid continues. Having steadily brought down the gap to the Q2 cut line over the first three rounds, Fernando Alonso successfully breached it in Bahrain by a rather emphatic four tenths of a second margin after delivering one of the laps of the whole qualifying hour in Q1. Reality struck a little later in the second phase when the Spaniard slipped back down the order to 14th, but he still only missed Q3 by less than four tenths of a second. Progress indeed.
Given teams usually can’t make many improvements to their cars when the races run back-to-back – particularly outside of Europe – McLaren’s Q2 breakthrough is therefore particularly noteworthy. However, the plight of Jenson Button this weekend shows conclusively that a big cross hasn’t yet been put through ‘unreliability’ on McLaren’s job list with the Englishman’s MP4-30 breaking down three times in four sessions. Twentieth and last place on the grid underlines the work still to do in the three-week break before the European season begins.
Will Stevens impresses again
It can be tough to make an impression in Formula 1 as a new driver, particularly when you’ve got an uncompetitive car. With the Manor Marussias slower than the top five in GP2 qualifying and three seconds away from 17th-placed Daniil Kvyat in the F1 session, it is as if Will Stevens and Roberto Merhi are driving in their own formula.
All either driver can do is beat their team-mate and Stevens has had a clear edge over his Spanish team-mate in the two qualifying sessions that both have taken part in. In China that gap was just under eight tenths in qualifying and prior to the Safety Car during the race, it had grown to nearly 18 seconds. In Bahrain the qualifying advantage grew to over one second as Stevens firmly established his dominance – indeed he has been the top Manor car in every session this weekend.
Merhi is no slouch having finished third in FR3.5 last year and won the 2011 Euro F3 title, but has no answer to the pace of Stevens who is quickly proving himself worthy of a place at the pinnacle of motorsport. But will anyone notice?
