Vettel takes pole in Suzuka qualifying

Sebastian Vettel will start from pole position in tomorrow’s Japanese Grand Prix after an action-packed qualifying session at Suzuka this afternoon. The scheduled qualifying hour was delayed by three red flag periods courtesy of three separate crashes in Q2 and Q3, eventually ending half an hour late.

With Red Bull’s Mark Webber having been ruled out of qualifying after damaging his chassis in final practice, just four drivers would be eliminated in Q1. After a largely trouble-free session for most drivers, Giancarlo Fisichella (1m31.704s) dropped out at the first hurdle for the second successive time, followed closely by home hero Kazuki Nakajima (1m31.718s) who was unable to turn local knowledge into a Q2-worthy laptime.

Barrichello wins in Italy as his second victory of season

Brazil’s Rubens Barrichello led home a deserved Brawn 1-2 at Monza this afternoon, taking full advantage of a one-stop strategy to leapfrog pole-sitter Lewis Hamilton. The Briton had been set to take a comfortable third place but crashed on the final lap after pushing too hard for second.

At the start, top-three starters Hamilton, Sutil and Räikkönen all had reasonable starts, with Räikkönen getting the best getaway only to have his chance of taking the lead scuppered by being pushed onto the grass by Hamilton. Behind, Heikki Kovalainen lost three places on the opening lap, as Barrichello, Button and Liuzzi all found their way by.

Hamilton was the first of the two-stoppers to pit as planned on lap 15, four laps earlier than then rival Räikkönen. Nevertheless, Lewis was able to keep ahead of the Finn, but a sterner challenge was coming from even further behind from the one-stopping Brawns.

Barrichello wins European Grand Prix

Brazil’s Rubens Barrichello secured his first Formula One victory in almost five years with an impressive display on the streets of Valencia this afternoon. Despite starting third, and keeping his position off the line, Barrichello picked off Kovalainen and Hamilton in consecutive pitstops, to eventually win with ease and put him back in the championship fight.

With fellow championship contenders Button, Webber and Vettel falling from contention for the win early on, Barrichello has jumped to second in the championship fight, 18 points behind team-mate Button, who scored two points today. Both Webber and Vettel failed to score after a disastrous race for Red Bull.

Before the Malaysian Grand Prix

After a very surprising start to the 2009 season at Melbourne, we are about to see second race of the season at Malaysia. This season the race will start two hours later than past years. There is a %80 chance of rain during the race and since the race will start late, it may be darker and this may cause visibility problems for the drivers.

At Friday during both practice sessions, teams were very closely matched and the competition was very high as expected. Ferrari seemed better than last race and both drivers managed to do very consistent and fast laps during their long stints. RedBull and Williams seemed to be in a good position too whereas Brawn’s and Toyota’s struggled with their cars balance a bit. One thing very clear is that the softer tires offer better durability and less performance drop during the long stints than Melbourne. For example almost all the fastest lap times came during the long stints (13 – 15 laps) with softer compounds. This was not the case at last weekend’s grand prix. Let’s look at the times deeper and try to analyze the practice lap times;

Melbourne Practice

2009 season has finally started today with a lot of questions and concerns in mind. Despite these two sessions were only practice sessions, we have surprisingly three teams which are the subject of diffuser protests at the top of the standings. They are closely followed by Red Bull, Ferrari and Renault while BMW and McLaren were near the bottom. As you know practice is only for setup the car and evaluate different options. So, Let’s try to analyze which teams are really fast and which teams are not.

Ferrari seemed better in the first practice whereas they had some difficulties in the second one. They are very consistent over the long runs and Massa was running in low and medium 27′s in one of his ten lap stints. Thinking that most of the fastest times of their rivals have been set during the short stints Ferrari is now in a strong position for the race. As far as race fuel loads concerned, they have a very solid car with the prime tires from the beginning. But their problems started to rise when they opted to softer tires. They were almost without grip and missing brake points at every corner. This is mostly because of the graining at their rear tires. Also as I realized Massa was pressing KERS button a couple of times during a lap. So, they are probably using KERS not just once, but a couple of times during a lap which is logical for the circuits like Melbourne with mpre than one circuits.