Saturday scorcher sees Rosberg take pole at home

(Pirelli Motorsport Media)

Today's qualifying session for the German Grand Prix at Hockenheim was an absolutely sensational session and with the track temperature reaching 55 - 57 degrees. This meant that it could be difficult for the teams to get the maximum performance from the Pirelli tyres.

However, despite the blistering track temperatures it was a fantastic session for Mercedes Nico Rosberg who took pole position in front of his home crowd with the Williams Martini Racing Team duo of Valtteri Bottas and Felipe Massa qualifying in third and fourth place respectively.

This weekend Pirelli have given teams the P-Zero yellow marked Soft compound tyre and P-Zero red marked Super-Soft tyre. 

Due to the nature of the circuit layout at the Hockenheimring the race is one of the longest in terms of the number of laps to be complete and tomorrow the race distance will be 67 laps.

Pirelli are predicting that the fastest strategy will is a two stop race however it is possible to run the race on a three stop strategy. In order to get the most out of two stop strategy the ideal lap for the first stop is lap 18 for the Super Soft compound before stopping again on lap 38.

Pirelli's Motorsport Director Paul Hembery said:

'We saw a dramatic qualifying session with track temperature that was, if anything, even higher than it had been yesterday. As we expected, the supersoft was the tyre to qualify on, being about a second quicker than the soft. This obviously affected the qualifying strategy, with all the drivers apart from Bottas and Hamilton using the supersoft even in Q1. Teams are obviously thinking ahead to the race tomorrow, but with a possibility of heavy showers, it will be hard to make any firm predictions for a strategy. The teams that have managed to save tyres for the race may not be able to reap the benefit of them if the wet weather tyres are instead needed. And as the teams don’t really have any relevant wet weather data for Hockenheim, this would certainly be a very interesting turn of events.'

© Ben Johnston 2014