2017 Italian Grand Prix

Kiskaloo

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Extreme rain pushed the end of Q1 to three hours after an extended Red Flag session and Q3 was the most-intense at Monza since 2008, but when it was all done Lewis on pole with his 69th (new record) and once the penalties are taken into account, Stroll in 2nd and Ocon in 3rd. Ferrari were nowhere in the extreme wet so I am guessing they are set-up for the dry.

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Interesting to see Vettel get piped by Kimi at the end there, he seemed to be much stronger throughout but they just lost it as Q3 went on.
 
Ferrari is so lucky that red bull decided to take their penalties this race!
 
It's strange that their performance maybe not dropped off but levelled out while everyone else found more and more. In Q2 when they were running the inters it seemed like they were switching them on quicker than Mercedes and at least had enough pace to be 3-4 if not split the Mercedes. Vettel better hope he can make a killer start and then catch Hamilton. It doesn't seem likely he'll win at this stage but at least if he can find himself in 2nd then a win at Singapore will take his championship lead back. It will be interesting to see the tire strategies. Maybe they could start on the soft and go to the super soft.
 
I am kinda rooting for Vettel this year but you have to hand it to Mercedes and Hamilton this weekend. They were both in a league of their own. Hopefully Singapore will have the tables switched back again.
 
I enjoyed the booing of Hamilton. That was pretty funny.
 
I would argue that Kimi was being a bit lazy there, tbh.
 
A little embarrassing for Ferrari to have the Mercedes just steam off like that especially after they seemed to make a decent start. Or rather Kimi seemed to make a decent start until about a lap later when Bottas took him to the cleaners and he complained about the rear end grip. I was hopeful that Vettel could put the hammer down once he got into 3rd but the gap went from 4 seconds to 11 seconds within 10 laps at which point I couldn't really be bothered paying attention to the race.
 
I dunno if lazy or just lack of skill/talent today.
They did notice in time that he wasnt going to get past Ocon, so they opted for the undercut, which worked fine, but in the end all he did was damage control.

Mercs seem to have the edge on Ferrari here (by some margin), and it looks like aside from taking a lap longer to warm up their tyres, they'll keep this advantage for the remainder of the season.
Frankly, I don't see Vettel becoming WDC now, he'll have to beat Hamilton fair and square a couple of times, dunno if he'll be able to.
 
I don't know why this outcome is surprising, when you castrate engine development and resources you get a shit racing series.

It's hard to find the driving from Lewis and Bottas impressive when the engines are doing 90% of the work.
 
they managed fine in spa? and riccardio managed to make up 14 places? you can't blame the engines for that!

i think ferrari messed up their low downforce package, and didn't managed to find the sweet spot
i think they'll be back up there in the next races...
 
Red Bull may be struggling to compete with Ferrari and Mercedes but they're still worlds ahead of the rest of the field. They also took in a fresh engine for this race which probably helped their performance somewhat. Ricciardo was on the faster tire when he out braked Kimi into turn 1, I think it was turn 1.

Ferrari will probably pull it back in the upcoming races though I think, unless they've abandoned development of the car which is unlikely when Vettel needs the development to win the championship. Hopefully it is just a set up issue and Vettel manages to pull out his 2nd half of the year dominance that he's had in the past.
 
"Ferrari qualified so poorly cos their car was set up for dry conditions, you'll see in the race, it'll be a slaughter"

Riiiiiiiiight. Fuck. So humiliated in home turf.

Grats to RIC, driver of the day for sure.
 
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