The expectant fans rose out of their seats on Saturday to cheer their hero Fernando Alonso as he crossed the line . . . fourth fastest.
With Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber qualifying one-two ahead of McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton, it was an anti-climatic moment — for this was supposed to have been the serendipitous moment when Ferrari’s extensive update put the home hero right back in this season’s driving seat.
The omens had been good through the practices, with apparently nothing to choose between the pace of the Ferrari — utilising a new key technical feature of an “exhaust-blown diffuser” — and the Red Bull that had inspired the update.
With Alonso not having won since the opening round in Bahrain, but still well in touch in the points table, a victory today would relaunch his campaign. But on a track that historically features a dearth of overtaking spots, his prospects of doing that now look slim.
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His words afterwards were not despondent, but the tone could not hide the disappointment: “It was important to show we are capable of fighting for the top places and we did. We must bear in mind that without the updates we have brought we would probably not have made it into Q3.”
Just as in the wildly fluctuating Canadian race two weeks ago, the key to the variance in form appeared to be the tyres and the unpredictable way various cars reacted to the two different available types.
“We are not finding the lap time that should be there when we switch to the softer compound tyre,” explained Ferrari’s technical boss Aldo Costa, “and this is something we need to understand. During the Friday practices we did not have this problem so much, but today we do. All that has changed is the surface and temperature of the track.”
The Red Bulls suffered no such problems and sewed up the front row, the eighth time in the nine races to date that one of their cars has started from pole.
“People were saying that this was a track we might struggle at,” said Vettel, “and we proved them wrong, though to be honest it shouldn’t be the best circuit for us.”
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The car excels particularly in high-speed bends, but this street track built around the 2007 America’s Cup marina has only slow corners linked by long straights. One of the key reasons for the Red Bull’s cornering grip advantage is believed to be its feature of using the exhaust gas to speed up the airflow around the downforce-inducing diffuser on the car’s underside.
Ferrari, Renault and Mercedes have all copied the idea and introduced it to their cars for the first time here, with McLaren expected to fit its version in time for the next race at Silverstone.
For this reason, championship leader Hamilton was not expecting to do well here and was actually pleasantly surprised with his third-fastest time. With the memory of how he pressured the Red Bull pair into colliding with each other two races ago, he was decidedly upbeat when discussing his prospects for today.
“This is great. Third on the grid was way better than we were expecting and from here anything is possible,” he said.
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Hamilton’s feisty audacity will now be a serious worry to the Red Bull drivers, particularly as his car is faster down the straights than theirs, a great boon for overtaking.
Webber played that prospect down, saying: “You don’t get passing here. It’s all going to be about the start. This is a race where in the past people have struggled to stay awake! So it’s not going to be like in Canada.”
Webber will be hoping that Hamilton is too busy fending off Alonso at the start to be able to attack the Red Bulls — though all four drivers will be mindful of their championship campaigns.
Unlike in Canada there is no expectation of the tyres wearing out after just a few laps but their endurance around here is expected to allow a big variety in timing of pit stops, and it is likely that this will decide the outcome today.
Mark Hughes writes for Autosport magazine
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