Canadian Grand Prix Rosberg beats Hamilton to pole

Nico Rosberg took his second consecutive pole position by beating team-mate Lewis Hamilton during qualifying for the Canadian Grand Prix. With Hamilton having been fastest throughout qualifying and comfortably topping FP3 it was a somewhat of a surprise to see Rosberg set the quickest time on the opening runs in Q3 ahead of a close battle between the Williams pair and Daniel Ricciardo. On the final laps, Hamilton was up in the first sector but lost significant time to Rosberg in sector two and couldn’t close the gap, with Rosberg taking pole by 0.079s.

Sebastian Vettel will start third after an impressive final lap edged him ahead of the two Williams cars and his team-mate Ricciardo, with third to sixth place covered by just 0.041s. Fernando Alonso, Jean-Eric Vergne, Jenson Button and Kimi Raikkonen rounded out the top ten.Q2 saw Hamilton quickest but it took late laps for both he and Rosberg to beat the Williams pair as the two Mercedes appeared to struggle to get the supersoft tyre working on the first lap. Button delivered a good lap to put one McLaren in to the top ten, but team-mate Kevin Magnussen dropped out despite being less than 0.1s off Button’s time.

Button in eighth was 0.096s quicker than Magnussen in 12th, with Nico Hulkenberg missing out on a spot in Q3 by just 0.045s. Sergio Perez, Romain Grosean, Daniil Kvyat and Adrian Sutil were the other drivers to fail to make it through to the final part of qualifying.

With Esteban Gutierrez not running in Q1, there were only five drivers fighting to avoid dropping out in the first part of qualifying alongside the Sauber. Pastor Maldonado was in the bottom six when he encountered trouble in his Lotus and had to park the car at Turn 3.

With Sergio Perez spinning on his flying laps on supersoft tyres, Max Chilton had to find just 0.1s to progress in to Q2, but Marussia had decided to send him out very late and his hopes were dashed when Marcus Ericsson spun at Turn 9 and hit the wall, bringing out the red flags with 16 seconds to run.

With the session not restarting, Maldonado and Chilton dropped out alongside Jules Bianchi, Kamui Kobayashi, Ericsson and Gutierrez, with the two Marussias a second clear of the Caterhams.

Source: Crash.net