Monaco GP Qualifying 2

Not quite as spectacular as yesterday's qualy 1 but nevertheless there were a few movers on the grid today. I completely missed it yesterday but the Minardis are actually ahead of the Jordans and thats brilliant. Patrick Freisacher the faster and definitely the better looking of the two Faenza based cars, outpacing his highly rated Ductch teammate Christian Albers by more than a second.

The Jordans with a race fuel loads looked absolutely evil. Both Narain Karthikeyan and Tiago Monteiro busy fighting their cars rather than trying to set fiery laps. Narain having a huge oversteering slide into the Nouvelle chicane. Monteiro in fact running into trouble in the warm up lap outbraking himself and off into the escape road at Mirabeau.

Jacques Villeneuve wasn't quite able to reproduce yesterday's good form. In fact his lap time today was slower once more than Filipe Massa and crucially, the two Ferraris. But on aggregate he still lead his teammate and Barrichello. Michael Schumacher looked a lot better today and produced a quicker lap time than JV to lead him on aggregate and starts on eighth. Dammit.

David Coulthard maintains his good run was seventh fastest today, just slightly ahead of Michael Schumacher. On aggregate, he'll start in seventh and will share row 4 of the grid with Michael Schumacher.

The top runners basically taking it easy and consolidating yesterday's gains. Except of Fernando Alonso, who put the hammer down and tried his best to close the nearly half a second gap between himself and Kimi Raikkonen. He nearly made it. His lap was the fastest lap in today's session and significantly was nearly 0.4 seconds faster than next fastest Kimi Raikkonen.

Raikkonen was probably carrying a heavier load today but he looked a little cautious and certainly didn't seem as quick as Alonso today. Nevertheless he's still 0.4 seconds faster on aggregate and starts in pole position for the third successive race this season. We'll need to see if the McLaren can defend against a fast starting Renault.

Well, this looks like the last Sunday qualifying ever. Lots of complaints from viewers and television stations has led the FIA to call for a change as early as next week. I think I'm one of the few losers here. Star Sports do carry the Sunday qualifying live. So there's less action for Asian satellite viewers like me to watch.

But the new qualifying regime suggested will see cars fueled for the race during qualifying. To me that sucks. I'd much prefer seeing them with empty fuel tanks and then we're able to guage the absolute speed of the cars. But word has it that this form of qualifying will return in 2006. Here's hoping.