Rosberg takes big leap on Hamilton in qualifying

Nico Rosberg will start on pole position for tomorrow’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. He was almost four tenths faster than Lewis Hamilton, despite the German being forced to run an older engine that has done some twice the mileage than the unit in the back of his World Champion team mate’s car.

This marks the sixth consecutive race that Rosberg has taken pole, and is the 15th front row lock-out for Mercedes this season – the most for any team in Formula One’s history.

Hamilton blamed a radical new approach to qualifying for his lack of speed compared to Rosberg. In a bid to find an advantage over his team mate, who has won the previous two races, Hamilton made late set-up changes which worked against the Brit.

“I’ve generally been struggling with the car a bit all weekend,” he said in the post-qualifying press conference, “But we’ve been working really hard to make some changes; we’ve had to take something off the car but no, Nico was just really quick today and he did a great job in Q3.”

Kimi Raikkonen was 3rd fastest for Ferrari, but his team mate Sebastian Vettel failed to make it past Q1, after a misjudgement from the pit wall saw Vettel abandon a lap he needed to make it out of the bottom five. He starts 16th.

He said: “Nothing wrong with the car, we thought that the lap I had on the Soft (harder) tyres was quick enough, but in the end it was not. There was also a car in front which shouldn’t have been there. So we misjudged the situation, a small mistake with big consequence, but the race is tomorrow and lots can happen.”

Force India have been on fine form all weekend, and qualifying was no exception with Sergio Perez sharing the second row of the grid with Raikkonen thanks to a lap where he said he managed to get the “maximum” out of the car.

Daniel Ricciardo lines up 5th with Valtteri Bottas 6th. Williams were lacking rear grip throughout qualifying, but are confident that their set-up will work better for them in the race. Felipe Massa was 8th behind Nico Hulkenberg.

Daniil Kvyat and Carlos Sainz rounded out the top 10. The Spaniard out-qualified his teenage team mate Max Verstappen who was 11th, winning him Toro Rosso’s intra-team qualifying battle for the season.

Jenson Button was 12th on a weekend where McLaren have been looking much more competitive, though they still lack the thick end of 30kph on their competitors. Fernando Alonso would likely have matched Button’s pace were it not for a puncture on his final run at the end of Q1, which meant he could only manage 17th.

Pastor Maldonado was 13th ahead of Felipe Nasr. Romain Grosjean failed to set a time in qualifying thanks to a gearbox issue so he starts 15th. Lotus, however, are confident that their race pace will be stronger than that of the cars surrounding them on the grid.

Marcus Ericsson was 18th. An issue on his car at the end of Q1 meant he was unable to improve his time. He starts ahead of the two Manor cars, with Will Stevens out-qualifying Roberto Merhi, but he takes a 5-place grid penalty for a new Control Electronics so will start last.

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