Chris
Premium
Lewis Hamilton has delivered a commanding and dominating performance in qualifying for the 2016 Italian Grand Prix by taking pole position ahead of Mercedes teammate Nico Rosberg by nearly half a second.
Right from the outset, Mercedes were confident enough that their pace advantage was such that they need not bother with the Super-Soft compound for the first session of qualification, instead opting to only venture out of the pit lane for a single run on the yellow-marked Soft compound. With both cars comfortably in first and second, they remained in their garage's for the remainder of the session.
Further back, a tight battle was shaping up between Ferrari, Williams and Red Bull. Despite the latter's power disadvantage, the bulk of their lap time came from the second sector as the RB12 is widely considered the second best chassis on the grid.
Perhaps surprisingly, the biggest scalp from Q1 was Esteban Ocon. The Manor F1 team have shown strong pace this weekend, at a track which they've calendar-marked since the season's beginning as a place to score points. Suffering an electrical fault, Ocon would be forced to retire from the session and start the race from dead last. A clean race will almost certainly see him get closer to the points. Predictably, the others who lost out in Q1 were Kvyat, Nasr, Ericsson, Palmer and Magnussen.
In his final Italian GP, Felipe Massa couldn't get it done in Q2.
When the second session got underway, Mercedes essentially gave the middle-finger to every other team and went out again on the soft tyre, rather than the Super-Soft. This was a clear indicator of their intentions to make a one-stopper work on Sunday as they would start the race on the soft allowing them to run longer than their rivals in the first stint, who all used the Super-Soft for Q2. Yet again they were comfortably fastest as they turned the wick up on their engines and made everyone else look silly. The Red Bull's also tried the Soft tyre strategy, but deemed it too risky after their first runs only put them in ninth and tenth, so they will start on the red-banded tyres instead.
Mercedes aside, the absolute star of the second session was Esteban Gutierrez, who managed to put his Haas F1 car into seventh, claiming the team's first ever Q3 appearance, as teammate Romain Grosjean comparatively struggled to even get close to the effort of his Mexican teammate and ultimately was eliminated after Q2. Another under-performer was Felipe Massa who cannot be happy with how his last ever Monza qualifying session went after he missed the cutoff for Q3 lapping only 11th fastest, half a second off his teammate in a car that realistically should be comfortably in the top ten.
Pascal Wehrlein yet again proved that, outside of Max Verstappen, he is the hottest young driver property on the grid by lapping quick enough for 13th place on the grid with another stellar qualifying session.
Esteban Gutierrez was arguably the star of qualifying by achieving Haas' maiden Q3 appearance.
Going into Q3, the prediction of a Mercedes on pole looked like a certainty, the only question was which one? Hamilton had seemingly been the quicker of the two all weekend by a few tenths. Qualifying demonstrated this as he lapped in the low 1:21's, while Rosberg was in the high 21's. Interestingly, on the Super-Soft tyre, Mercedes hardly gained any time at all on a tyre that had shown, for some teams, up to a 1.2 second delta over the soft tyre.
The Ferrari's claimed top trumps in the battle to be best of the rest to take an all-red second row, while Valtteri Bottas had an excellent session to take fifth place by one one thousandth of a second from Daniel Ricciardo who yet again has proven to be The Man when it comes to out-qualifying teammates. Sergio Perez, having confirmed his position for 2017 with Force India out-qualified Hulkenberg for eighth place as Esteban Gutierrez was unable to match his efforts in Q2 to round out the top ten.
Rosberg's second run was unable to match the first lap set by Hamilton of a 1:21.358, with the German being three tenths off the Brit, solidifying Hamilton's pole position. However as Rosberg crossed the line, Hamilton was going quicker, and lowered the benchmark to a 1:21.135 to take the 56th pole position of his career by nearly half a second.
2016 Italian GP Grid
- Lewis Hamilton - Mercedes AMG Petronas
- Nico Rosberg - Mercedes AMG Petronas
- Sebastian Vettel - Scuderia Ferrari F1
- Kimi Raikkonen - Scuderia Ferrari F1
- Valtteri Bottas - Williams Martini Racing
- Daniel Ricciardo - Red Bull Racing
- Max Verstappen - Red Bull Racing
- Sergio Perez - Force India
- Nico Hulkenberg - Force India
- Esteban Gutierrez - Haas F1
- Felipe Massa - Williams Martini Racing
- Fernando Alonso - McLaren-Honda
- Pascal Wehrlein - Manor F1
- Jenson Button - McLaren-Honda
- Carlos Sainz Jr. - Toro Rosso
- Daniil Kvyat - Toro Rosso
- Romain Grosjean - Haas F1 (5 place grid penalty for gearbox change)
- Felipe Nasr - Sauber F1
- Marcus Ericsson - Sauber F1
- Jolyon Palmer - Renault Sport F1
- Kevin Magnussen - Renault Sport F1
- Esteban Ocon - Manor F1
Stick and stay with RaceDepartment for all the fallout and wash up from the Italian Grand Prix.
Images credit of FIA.com
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