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It’s fair to say Nick Heidfeld’s qualifying performances this season have not been great. Whereas he team mate has achieved 1 pole and regularly achieving 1st, 2nd or 3rd row starts, Nick has been all over the place – but is it his fault?
I decided to look into this and gathered some data from my notes to form the table below. This may not be very accurate (its all from my notes and done quickly) but it’s good enough for me to get an idea of what the problem is and confirm what was expected. These are the qualy places he managed during Q2 – not the final qualy position at the end of the day.
As Nick has been saying the problem clearly is getting temperature into his tyres. In the cold races his qualy performance has been poor and has seen him fail to make the top ten twice out of the 9 races so far.
In Silverstone the temperature was around 20/21 and he managed to qualify a solid 5th and in Turkey he just scrapped in with 9th in slightly cooler conditions Both these tracks used the same tyre range as Germany will use. Therefore it could be a combination of cooler weather and softer tyres which hurts the BMW, or maybe the other cars make better use of the softer compounds, or maybe a combination of all these factors.
So far this weekend he’s looked reasonable and I would expect him to get into the top 10….but his odds are 1.15 to reach Q3. For me that’s too low.
The weather today is overcast and with a high possibility of rain this throws even more luck into the mix. The temperatures are likely to be a low of 13 and high of 23 according to reports. BMW are the most daring team when it comes to rain, leaving runs until the last minute instead of getting in a banker lap. So given all these factors I’m having a punt (not a trade - so small stake) on a lay of Nick to reach Q3. I expect to loose but the odds in my opinion are too good.
I haven’t yet done my usual dutch of q3 as I want to see what the weather’s like. I noticed last week that Bet365 were offering shorter odds before P3 because of the rain threat, which then lengthened in-play when it was dry – I will hold to see if I can get better odds later on.
Predictions for the top end of qualy are still the same as before. If its dry then the McLarens have the one lap pace and Hamilton looks to have the upper hand on Heikki this weekend.
I decided to look into this and gathered some data from my notes to form the table below. This may not be very accurate (its all from my notes and done quickly) but it’s good enough for me to get an idea of what the problem is and confirm what was expected. These are the qualy places he managed during Q2 – not the final qualy position at the end of the day.
As Nick has been saying the problem clearly is getting temperature into his tyres. In the cold races his qualy performance has been poor and has seen him fail to make the top ten twice out of the 9 races so far.
In Silverstone the temperature was around 20/21 and he managed to qualify a solid 5th and in Turkey he just scrapped in with 9th in slightly cooler conditions Both these tracks used the same tyre range as Germany will use. Therefore it could be a combination of cooler weather and softer tyres which hurts the BMW, or maybe the other cars make better use of the softer compounds, or maybe a combination of all these factors.
So far this weekend he’s looked reasonable and I would expect him to get into the top 10….but his odds are 1.15 to reach Q3. For me that’s too low.
The weather today is overcast and with a high possibility of rain this throws even more luck into the mix. The temperatures are likely to be a low of 13 and high of 23 according to reports. BMW are the most daring team when it comes to rain, leaving runs until the last minute instead of getting in a banker lap. So given all these factors I’m having a punt (not a trade - so small stake) on a lay of Nick to reach Q3. I expect to loose but the odds in my opinion are too good.
I haven’t yet done my usual dutch of q3 as I want to see what the weather’s like. I noticed last week that Bet365 were offering shorter odds before P3 because of the rain threat, which then lengthened in-play when it was dry – I will hold to see if I can get better odds later on.
Predictions for the top end of qualy are still the same as before. If its dry then the McLarens have the one lap pace and Hamilton looks to have the upper hand on Heikki this weekend.
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Haha – that was probably a bit lucky. At the start of qualy the weather was starting to look better and the temperature rising to mid 20’s. The lay odds of 1.15 I got were looking good though as he had drifted out to 1.31. I decided I would lay off the stake for a free bet and leave it at that so I could concentrate on the pole market.
It was going to be close but it looked like he had the pace to reach the top 10, then he made a mistake on his last lap ruined it completely - and won me the free bet. I say lucky because another day he may not have made that mistake and made it into Q3.
Good shout based on sound logic. I wish I'd seen this earlier.