Sebastian Vettel does it again in Saturday’s practice session at Singapore
Red Bull has done it again as they conquered news headlines by clinching the third practice session at the Marina Bay circuit in Singapore on Saturday. After timing the fastest lap in the second practice session on Friday, Sebastian Vettel topped the timesheets
once again. The track was still damp in some corners, forcing the teams to run on intermediates during most of the time. A safe analysis suggests that Red Bull was by far the fastest car on track in both dry and wet conditions. Sebastian was six tenths clear
of Fernando Alonso in his Ferrari who dominated the session as he kept improving his own time before setting the fastest lap of the session at 1:48.028 - just 2 minutes before the end of the session.
The McLaren of Lewis Hamilton looked strong during this session as he finished at 3rd spot, almost four tenths behind the Spaniard. However, it felt as if the dominant team during Saturday’s session was Ferrari as Alonso timed the second fastest
lap. Meanwhile, his team timed in behind Lewis Hamilton, ending at 4th place. Both of them were running some tests throughout the session and tried the F-duct as well but it seemed that they might not use it as they removed it to the latter stages.
After evaluating tests with and without the F-duct, it seems that Ferrari presumably might not use the F-duct for the rest of the weekend since they were able to score better times without it.
Nico Rosberg in the Mercedes breezed ahead of teammate Michael Schumacher by quite a margin once more as Michael finished in a disappointing 15th place. Nico finished in 5th place ahead of Mark Webber in the Red Bull. Mark seemed to
struggle as he was still running a few tests. The Williams of Nico Hulkenberg finished in 7th place ahead of Robert Kubica in his Renault in 8th. Adrian Sutil looked impressive as he finished at the 9th place. However, it was
disappointing to see Button at the tail end of the timesheets in 15th place but it was mainly due to the amount of traffic near the end of the session. It was because Bruno Senna stopped as he misjudged the entry to turn 18 and did not have enough
space to turn his car out of the way. Bruno finished at the very end of the timesheets and ruined everyone else’s final five minutes while he was at it.
Tonio Liuzzi, Nick Heidfeld and Kamui Kobayashi will be battling it out to escape Q1 as they qualified in 16th, 17th and 18th places respectively. Heidfeld came back to the grid with high hopes as his car was not strong enough
to give him the results he was expecting at the Singapore Grand Prix.
The top three teams seem equally competitive for the Singapore GP and qualifying session at Marina Bay will definitely hold a plethora of surprises for everyone. Rain is expected to hit the circuit throughout the weekend and the qualifying session will be
quite a challenge. With such variable conditions, teams are finding it tough to decide on one particular strategy for the Singapore Grand Prix and it is still too early to predict any results. At one point, it seemed that Fernando might top the sheets but
Vettel got a clear track one too many times. The final 5 minutes saw almost all the cars making it very difficult for the drivers to score flawless laps. One can say that Vettel got lucky but his progress speaks for itself and we cannot take that away from
the German.
The teams head to the qualifying session with hopes of improved conditions in order to secure a good place on the grid. The qualifying session is going to be thrilling after the random weather and condition changes.
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