By SA07
May 26 2007

After what had been an intresting qualifying in the tight streets of Monaco Fernando Alonso stamped his authority to Lewis Hamilton and pipped him to pole while other teams struggled to match there pace. The 1 hour qualifying session also saw spitting rain, lots of traffic and both Super Aguri cars drop out of the second session.

Qualifying for the monaco Grand Prix was pretty close between most teams except Mclaren who were running a session of there own! We also saw the bizzare antics of Kimi Raikkonen who made a error which cost him a steering arm. David Coulthard ironically got penalised for blocking supplier team Renault F1. Coulthard had been protesting better and harsher rules on traffic and blockinf for a while now and when he eventually got the stewards to do this I bet he didnt imagine he would be on the end of the penalty.

Unfortunately Aguri made a timing error and did not allow Davidson to have all the laps he wanted while it was a similar story for Sato as chances of rain caught the team on there back foot. We ended up Davidson 17th and Sato a lowly 21st our worst qualifying session of the season and even had arch rival Spyker beating us.

 

Here are the driver opinions from todays Qualifying session from www.formula1.com

Anthony Davidson, Super Aguri (17th, 1m 18.250s):
“As was the case for everybody, we experienced really difficult conditions today. The qualifying session was quite frantic and I feel that my side of the garage did a great job in getting the car out there in a good space. It was unfortunate to miss out on not getting a final run in as we wanted to try and complete three runs because it looked like it could rain at any moment. However, I don't feel anyone did anything wrong, so I'm happy with what we did, it was just bad luck.”

Takuma Sato, Super Aguri (21st, 1m 18.554s):
“Obviously the morning wet session made it difficult for everybody, but at least we collected good data for running in these conditions. Going into qualifying, the first outing was just a warm up and then in the second outing I caught some traffic, so I wasn't able to do a relevant quick lap. Then when I came back to the pit to prepare for the last qualifying lap our timing plan was incorrect and we couldn't make it across the line for a third run, which was very disappointing.”

Pos.	Driver	Team	Time
1	Fernando Alonso	McLaren	1:15.726
2	Lewis Hamilton	McLaren	1:15.905
3	Felipe Massa	Ferrari	1:15.967
4	Giancarlo Fisichella	Renault	1:16.285
5	Nico Rosberg	Williams	1:16.439
6	Mark Webber	Red Bull	1:16.784
7	Nick Heidfeld	BMW	1:16.832
8	Robert Kubica	BMW	1:16.955
9	Rubens Barrichello	Honda	1:17.498
10	Jenson Button	Honda	1:17.939
11	Alex Wurz	Williams	1:16.662
12	Vitantonio Liuzzi	STR Ferrari	1:16.703
13	Jarno Trulli	Toyota	1:16.988
14	Hekki Kovalainen	Renault	1:17.125
15	Kimi Räikkönen	Ferrari	no time
16	David Coulthard*	Red Bull	no time
17	Anthony Davidson	Super Aguri	1:18.250
18	Scott Speed	STR Ferrari	1:18.390
19	Adrian Sutil	Spyker F1	1:18.418
20	Ralf Schumacher	Toyota	1:18.539
21	Takuma Sato	Super Aguri	1:18.554
22	Chrsitijan Albers	Spyker F1	no time

*provisional unconfirmed racing position.