Inaugural United States GP pole for Sebastian Vettel
Sebastian Vettel managed to score the pole in the inaugural Grand Prix in Austin by using parts that were specially flown in the night before. Red Bull has been relentlessly developing the car to ensure Sebastian Vettel to win the drivers championship. In comparision his competitor for this years driver's championship title Fernando Alonso has been forced to depend on his individual brilliance as his Ferrari team has been lagging behind in this development race. Ferrari being a marque team with a huge motor racing history as well as sports car business is lagging behind Red Bull which is a soft drinks company. The humiliation for Ferrari can't be more. Considering the fact that in 2010, Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel stole the title from Fernando Alonso in the last race.
Lewis Hamilton, driving his penultimate race for McLaren gave a big fight to Sebastian Vettel but had to settle for second position scoring 1:35.766 s to Vettel's 1m 35. 657seconds.
Mark Webber of Red Bull came third and was allowed to retain his place though he missed a mandatory post qualifying weigh in.
Romain Grosjean outqualified his fancied team mate Kimi Raikkonen to score a 4th postion. However, he picks up a five place grid penalty for changing his gearbox. So Kimi Raikkonen will now start at 4th position.
Michael Schumacher - the God of Formula One - driving the penultimate race before his retirement, scored a strong sixth position. Due to Grosjean's penalty, he will now start at fifth position. His much younger teammate Nico Rosberg starts at a poor 17th position. As usual, Nico Rosberg was quick to jump to his defence and talked about using a different exhaust system than Michael. Nico Rosberg was faster than Michael in FP1 and FP3 and had never talked about using a different exhaust system than Michael Schumacher. However, he choose to give an excuse when he was 11 places lower than Michael Schumacher in Qualifying. This has been the story in every race when Micahel Schumacher is faster. On the other hand, Michael Schumacher being a self assured person doesn't even talk about equipment deficiency when his car breaks down or when that leads to his slower times.
Ferrari team mates Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso were 7th and 9th and will now start at 6th and 8th due to Romain Grosjean's grid penalty.
Nico Hulkenberg of Force India, brought some good news for his team at a time when both the majority owners of Force India are having financial troubles, by qualifying in 8th place. His team mate Paul di Resta will start at 13th.
Pastor Maldonado of Williams will start at 10th position whereas his team mate Bruno Senna will start at 11th. Jenson Button of McLaren will start at a poor 12th position, separated by a massive ten positions from his teammate Lewis Hamilton who will start second. Since Hamilton is leaving McLaren after this season to join Mercedes, the McLaren team will be ruing the mistake they did by not giving in to the demands of Lewis Hamilton. Some of those sore points which led to Lewis Hamilton's moving away to Mercedes was the right to retain the winner's trophy. McLaren wanted to take away the trophy won by its drivers.
Jean-Eric Vergne of Toro Rosso gave a good account of himself by scoring the 14th position. He was followed by the Sauber's of Sergio Perez and Kamui Kobayashi at 15th and 16th.
Daniel Ricciardo of Toro Rosso was 18th. Timo Glock and Charles Pic of Marussia scored 19th and 20th positions ahead of the two Caterham cars of Heikki Kovalainen and Vitaly Petrov. With Marussia now being ahead of Caterham in the driver's championship due to Timo Glock's 12th place finish in the Singapore Grand Prix, and the Marussia showing more pace than the Caterham cars, it appears that Marussia will score the 10th place in the team championship. That should be worth about 20 million pounds and will come as a severe blow to the Caterham team.
The rear was brought up by Pedro de la Rosa and Narain Karthikeyan of HRT. Narain Karthikeyan's car stopped with a problem. The HRT team is financially very weak and its management is hoping to sell the team outright. It is not sure if the HRT team can do a good job in the race, as there are some doubts about the parts being used. They have stopped development long time ago due to paucity of funds.
It would be good if an Indian company like Tata's can buy this F1 team outright and invest resources and turn it into a winning team. Narain and the Indian fans deserve it.
