F1 News
Date: 18/November/2012
If Sebastian Vettel and Fernando
Alonso finish where they qualified for the US F1 Grand Prix, Vettel will
comfortably win his third successive World Championship on Sunday.
The Red Bull driver continued his
domination of the new Texas event, held at a challenging and slippery Circuit
of the Americas, with a sixth pole position of the season.
By contrast, Ferrari’s Alonso has
looked uncomfortable all weekend, could only manage ninth in qualifying and
suffered a rare defeat by team-mate Felipe Massa.
“I’m very, very pleased with the
result obviously,” said Vettel. “We started off on the right foot yesterday
when first practice was very good for us.
“Obviously the asphalt is brand new and it
takes a while for the track to come in but it's also quite a lot fun to slide
around a couple of corners and it just got better throughout.
“You see the lap times just
getting quicker and quicker, so the circuit is ramping-up massively.
“Through qualifying I think we
were very happy. In the last section I would have loved to go a little bit
quicker. It was a little bit closer than I wanted with Lewis [Hamilton]. But
overall, fantastic.
“Obviously, it’s very important
here to start from the front. We start on the clean side so it should be a good
race tomorrow.”
Alonso, who needs to prevent
Vettel gaining 15 points or more on Sunday to take the title to the Brazilian
finale, will move up one place on the
grid due to a penalty for Romain Grosjean - but that also puts the Spaniard on
the dirty side of the track.
“We knew it would be a complicated
weekend, but clearly today we were too slow and we will start from too far
back,” said Alonso.
“But our aim remains unchanged and
it’s still possible: on Sunday all sorts of things can happen. Reliability,
strategy - it will be important to work out when is the best time to pit
because here, the cold tyres can be slower by several seconds - and team work
will be as usual important.
“We will push to the limit, as we
have done since the start of the year.”
Alonso lapped slower in Q3 than he
had in Q2, and was left 1.643s behind Vettel’s pole time.
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