ALL TOO LATE, NICO
NICE work, Nico. Shame it’s too late.
The world championship is over and Nico Rosberg is finally moving through the gears. He took his fifth pole in succession to start today’s Brazilian Grand Prix with a good chance of claiming his second consecutive victory. If he had started the season in this manner we might not be on the verge of our second dead rubber of three.
He was clinically quick over one lap, which he needed to be because the world champion, Lewis Hamilton, was hardly sluggish either. Neither man appeared to put a wheel thread out of place and it was Rosberg who finished eight-hundredths of a second ahead.
Hamilton, who will start second, was as sanguine as any man who only a few days earlier had pranged his £1.5million supercar could be. ‘My main job is done this year,’ he said. ‘Winning here in Brazil is not the important thing, but it is my target now. Last year I was strong in the race and I hope to carry it through.’
For Hamilton, this race holds significance, being the home track of his idol Ayrton Senna. And he has made history around this undulating circuit — snatching his first title on the last corner of the last lap of the 2008 season — but he has never won the grand prix here.
His hopes of doing so must remain strong, given that, other than in Mexico a fortnight ago, Rosberg has found it hard to convert pole positions into wins. Hamilton has now not taken pole since the Italian Grand Prix in September, a strange reversal of his imperious early season form over one lap.
But despite missing out on pole, he did not drive, or speak like a man weighed down by the travails of his week: crashing his car at 3.30am on Tuesday, then complaining of a fever that delayed his arrival in Brazil.
‘Pleased with today,’ was Rosberg’s verdict after his sixth pole of the year. ‘I was playing catch-up a little bit earlier in the afternoon but then in the final session I really got going and got some good laps in.’
McLaren could at least laugh at themselves despite their cars going out in the first session.
Fernando Alonso managed just two laps before his Honda engine conked out on him again. So he found a deck chair and pretended to sunbathe as qualifying went on around him. Team-mate Jenson Button’s afternoon was also soon over.
The two men then climbed on to the podium, waving and smiling. It was a nice touch given that McLaren have not remotely looked likely to get there by conventional means during their season of doom.