Vettel on top at Monza

Red Bull driver quickest in Italian GP practice session.

MONZA: Red Bull’s Formula One championship leader Sebastian Vettel did his best to demoralise the ranks of Ferrari fans at their home circuit with a stunning show of speed in the Italian Grand Prix practice yesterday.

The triple champion was a commanding 0.623 seconds quicker than his own teammate Mark Webber, next on the timesheets, in the afternoon sunshine at Monza with a fastest lap of one minute 24.453 seconds.

Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso, the German’s closest championship rival with a cavernous 46-point gap to make up and eight races remaining, was fifth and 0.877s off the pace on the fastest circuit on the calendar.

Last year’s winner Lewis Hamilton had put Mercedes on top in the morning session with Alonso putting in the second-best lap only 0.035s slower and Vettel fourth fastest. Hamilton, who will be chasing his fifth pole position in a row today, roared around Monza’s classic ‘Pista Magica’ in 1:25.565 on a sunny morning in the former royal park. He was sixth after lunch.

Alonso might have gone quicker than Hamilton in the morning had he not run wide, kicking up a cloud of dust, at the exit to the Parabolica corner on a fast lap with half an hour to go.

Hamilton’s teammate Nico Rosberg was third and seventh in the two sessions while former Ferrari driver Kimi Raikkonen, the 2007 champion now with Lotus, was fifth and third equal with the same afternoon time as his own teammate Romain Grosjean.

Raikkonen plays down chances 

Raikkonen suffered his first retirement of the season, ending a 27-race scoring run, at the previous race in Belgium and has fallen back to fourth in the championship behind Hamilton.

A banner in the start-finish grandstand, written in large red letters and positioned next to a Ferrari flag, declared ‘Kimi in pole’ in what looked like a throwback to 2007 when the Finn finished third at Monza for the Italian team.

Raikkonen has a longer wheelbase car for the race, the fastest on the calendar with speeds of up to 340kph, but has played down his chances.

“It will be very difficult,” he told reporters. “The low downforce circuits are probably not the strongest for us. Last year was difficult, and last year at Spa was quite tricky, and it wasn’t easy this year either.”

McLaren, with Mexican Sergio Perez and Britain’s Jenson Button, were in the top 10 in both sessions with Ferrari’s Felipe Massa ending the afternoon eighth fastest.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 7^th, 2013.

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