Formula 1 Events

Australia was the track chosen to start the 2008 season, a season that needs a lot of people to do a lot of work to make Formula 1 regain its standing and turn away from some of the mess of last year.

 

During the practice sessions, the first of the year, Ferrari had been looking really strong and were leading the pack. BMW are also suggesting a new found strength, along with Red Bull.

 

However it’s not all good, we see Fernando Alonso entering his stint with Renault, and Honda look set to have an all time low. Ross Brawn has a lot of work to do there.

 

So to the qualifying. There’s a new format, although not that much different. What they have done is restrict the timings of the sessions, each session gets shorter and there’s no daft fuel burn stage in the final session, we get straight to the lap times with only ten minutes track time.

 

How did the drivers take to it? Particularly with the removal of all the driving aids? Well it was interesting to watch, there were so many more seat of the pants moments and the order was slightly disrupted. Here’s how it played out.

 

 

First Session:

The biggest surprise was that Kimi Räikkönen bowed out of the session rather unceremoniously. Near the end of the session, just after his first run, he started driving back to the pits rather slowly, far too slowly in fact.

 

He tried to pull it back to the pits but the car was coasting to a stop and did so before he made it back to the Ferrari garage from the pit lane and he was disqualified for stopping the vehicle.

 

 

Second Session:

Another early surprise for the second session was poor Mark Webber on his home Grand Prix, unfortunately his car suffered brake failure and sped off the track destined not to return.

 

The rest of the drivers who left the second session were:

 

Third Session:

Fernando Alonso was the big surprise for the third session as he fell out of the way too.

 

Poor Felipe Massa was also out as the second Ferrari driver failed to post a strong time in the closing moments of the last session.

 

Another surprise was that David Coulthard was in eighth, bring the Red Bull right up the grid, but he wasn’t that convinced and thinks that there’s much more in the car yet.

 

It wasn’t Lewis Hamilton that was the big star of the qualifying either, despite taking pole position with a superb qualifying time, it was Robert Kubica who took second place for BMW.

After the qualifying Toyota’s Timo Glock was docked a further five places on the grid for blocking Mark Webber during the qualifying, sadly he’d already been docked five places for changing a gearbox.

 

With that, here are the final pole standings for the 2008 Australian Grand Prix, now watch that start closely because without traction control and the starting systems this could be a really exciting first few corners.
 

Position	Driver	Team	Session 1	Session 2	Session 3
1st	Lewis Hamilton	McLaren-Mercedes	1:26.572	1:25.187	1:26.714
2nd	Robert Kubica	BMW	1:26.103	1:25.315	1:26.869
3rd	Heikki Kovalainen	McLaren-Mercedes	1:25.664	1:25.452	1:27.079
4th	Felipe Massa	Ferrari	1:25.994	1:25.691	1:27.178
5th	Nick Heidfeld	BMW	1:25.960	1:25.518	1:27.236
6th	Jarno Trulli	Toyota	1:26.427	1:26.101	1:28.527
7th	Nico Rosberg	Williams-Toyota	1:26.295	1:26.059	1:28.687
8th	David Coulthard	Red Bull-Renault	1:26.381	1:26.063	1:29.041
9th	Timo Glock	Toyota	1:26.919	1:26.164	1:29.593
10th	Sebastian Vettel	STR-Ferrari	1:26.702	1:25.842	None
11th	Rubens Barrichello	Honda	1:26.369	1:26.173
12th	Fernando Alonso	Renault	1:26.907	1:26.188
13th	Jenson Button	Honda	1:26.712	1:26.259
14th	Kazuki Nakajima	Williams-Toyota	1:26.891	1:26.413
15th	Mark Webber	Red Bull-Renault	1:26.914	None
16th	Kimi Räikkönen	Ferrari	1:26.140
17th	Giancarlo Fisichella	Force India-Ferrari	1:27.207
18th	Sebastien Bourdais	STR-Ferrari	1:27.446
19th	Adrian Sutil	Force India-Ferrari	1:27.859
20th	Takuma Sato	Super Aguri-Honda	1:28.208
21st	Nelsinho Piquet	Renault	1:28.330
22nd	Anthony Davidson	Super Aguri-Honda	1:29.059