Hola! It's Sunday, and the Losail circuit's first inaugural never-to-be-repeated Qatar Grand Prix is less than two hours from beginning. Barring any strange events it ought to be a quick race, so I will also be brief.
Qualifying put Lewis Hamilton on pole with Max Verstappen alongside. Same old, but Lewis put nearly half a second on the Red Bull driver, and was eight-tenths up on his teammate Valtteri Bottas. Perhaps equally worrying for Verstappen and Red Bull, their other driver Sergio Perez starts 11th after a misjudged and not very inspired Q2. Charles Leclerc and Daniel Ricciardo had similar experiences of being vastly outqualified by their teammates: they start on row 7 while Norris is 6th and Sainz 7th. Red Bull B squad AlphaTauri, and intriguingly enough Fernando Alonso's Alpine, took advantage, all placing comfortably in the top 10.
The top three are all starting on Pirelli's medium tyre compound and owing to high levels of wear on the high corner speed, high degredation circuit, two-stop strategies are expected. Nobody has enough hard tyres and the mediums look likely to be good for something less than half Qatar's 56 laps. But who knows?
Otherwise, expect the normal amounts of track limits complaining (there's a lot of tarmac everywhere) and in the event of any collisions, self-serving allusions to what race stewards had or hadn't decided earlier in the season. Nobody knows how easy it will be to overtake (pro: long straight, high downforce; anti: long fast corners, only one straight) but as usual it'll probably come down to whose tyre strategies are clashing rather than anything inherent to the circuit. I don't know anything!
Race gets underway at 2pm GMT. Please change that into your local time at your leisure. I can't find those nice images F1 makes that tells you when the race is taking place from the great cities of the world. But, switch your feed on in around 90 minutes or so and it'll be there. Enjoy!
)) The situation compels you
