(Pirelli Motorsport Media)
Mercedes AMG PETRONAS F1 Team's Nico Rosberg set a new record at the Interlagos circuit in Brazil today by setting the fastest ever Formula One qualifying lap to be recorded at the famous circuit. The German set a time of 1m 10.023s on a brand new set of the Pirelli P-Zero Yellow walled Soft tyre beating team mate Lewis Hamilton to the 2014 pole position trophy by just 0.033s as the German claimed his tenth pole of the year for the Silver Arrows.
McLaren Mercedes Jenson Button and Kevin Magnussen go into tomorrow's race with a brand new set of Soft tyre's as the pair managed to do their final qualifying runs in Q3 on a set of used Pirelli Soft compound rubber. They will start the race from the third and fourth row of the grid respectively with Jenson Button starting the race from fifth place and Kevin Magnussen in 7th.
The Brazilian Grand Prix takes place over 71 laps and Pirelli predict a that a two stop strategy carries less risk to a three stop strategy in relation to coming out into traffic and for this strategy to work for cars starting on the Soft tyre they should stop on lap 13 for the Medium tyre before switching to another set of the Medium tyre's on lap 42.
However for drivers electing to start the race on the Medium tyre they change for another set of the Medium compound tyre on lap 29 before making their second and final stop on lap 58 for the faster Yellow walled Soft compound tyre.
Speaking following today's track action Pirelli Motorsport Director Paul Hembery stated:
'We had cooler conditions today, which suited our nominated tyres better than the unusually hot track temperatures that we saw yesterday.
Qualifying was an extremely tight battle, with the threat of rain providing an extra edge, but that threat if anything will intensify tomorrow. Obviously this will have a big effect on the strategy, but if it stays dry the quickest theoretical strategy is a three-stopper, although we would expect most teams to try a two-stopper in order to avoid getting caught up in traffic.
After an interrupted day yesterday all the teams managed to collect more data today, with the top two qualifiers separated by just three-hundredths of a second. We’ve seen the fastest-ever pole lap of Interlagos today, which underlines the way that the cars and the tyres have developed over the last 10 years.'
© Ben Johnston 2014
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