dr-baker wrote:Will Stevens has ended up about half-a-second behind Kamui in Q1. Not really comparable to Andre Lotterer in Spa - different teammate and vastly different level of experience. Andre had driven Spa many times before, but I imagine Will has not driven Abu Dhabi much. And Will is still just emerging from the junior ranks. So given that, you would not necessarily expect Will to have done as well as Andre. So not bad, all things considered. Well within 107% too...
All in all, it's a quite respectable performance given the circumstances in which he has made it onto the grid - he's probably hoping that he'll at least be able to do more laps than Lotterer did in Spa.
On another note, there was a comment that Brundle made during the build up to qualifying that I found interesting, and it turns on the number of races that the teams are allowed to miss. He was suggesting that there seem to be different contract terms in the contracts the teams have with FOM and with the FIA - FOM's contract is a little more flexible, since they state that a team can skip up to three races before they forfeit their all rights to prize money (although Chilton was suggesting that, if the team misses three races, they end up losing some of their prize money).
However, Brundle was suggesting that the contract the teams sign with the FIA that establishes their entry rights is actually much stricter than FOM's terms and allows the FIA to invalidate all entry rights if a team misses one race - which is why, in the past couple of races, the stewards reports have noted the absence of Marussia and Caterham and stated that this will be reported to Todt. Whether the FIA would go that far is another matter though...
