Kimi
Raikkonen narrowly beat home hero Fernando Alonso to pole position in an
extremely close qualifying session for the Spanish Grand Prix. Kimi's team
mate Felipe Massa had to settle for third on the grid.
Kimi
indicated his potential already in the first Qualifying. After a
mediocre first attempt he set a fastest time of 1:20.701 minutes
in his second one and distant the second places Toyota driver
Jarno Trully by half a second. Kimi finally achieved the third
place behind Robert Kubica and Felipe Massa in Q2 after setting a
time of 1:20.785 minutes. The deciding third part then developed
into a true thriller. A poor first Q3 lap left him a provisisional
fifth place on the grid, half a second slower than his team mate
Felipe Massa, who was fastest till then. But the Brazilian then
failed to improve on his second flying lap, and was knocked off
the top spot by Alonso - showing superb form in the revised
Renault. The home crowd seemed set to celebrate a shock pole
position for their hero, only for Kimi to improve by a second on
his final lap and beat Alonso to pole by 0.091 seconds. It is the
first Pole Position of the season for the Finn and the 15th of his
Formula one career.
“I’ve
been chasing pole for a while now, but for one reason or another,
it always escaped me. But today I got it. There is no better place
to start so I will try and make the most of that tomorrow. It will
be important to get off the line well, getting through the first
corner without any problems. Then it will be down to exploiting
the car’s potential and that is definitely good. The race is
what matters and tomorrow I want to bring home a nice result. So
maybe it was not too bad doing so few laps in the dry in last
week’s test, as we were able to work on set-up with a different
approach. On my first run in Q3, I lost a bit of grip in the final
sector, but then on the second set of tyres everything went well.
The perfect lap? You can always do better.”
Qualifying