It is 100 years since the last Russian Grand Prix, but this afternoon’s race is likely to produce the same result: a Silver Arrow atop the podium.
When the 1914 race was held in St Petersburg, it was won by a Benz and today, 2,300 kilometres south at the Sochi Autodrome, Lewis Hamilton will start on pole position inside his Mercedes-GP car and teammate Nico Rosberg will sit alongside him on the grid for a race some drivers are predicting could be a procession.
The Mercedes-GP marque have been indomitable in recent weeks, locking out the front row on each of the past five races.
During yesterday’s qualifying, Valtteri Bottas, the Finnish driver with Williams, came within a corner of breaking that streak. He will start third after momentarily leaving the track on the final turn of his final lap.
Toto Wolff, the Mercedes team principal, conceded his team were “lucky Bottas made a mistake”.
There was nothing lucky about Hamilton’s lap though. The 2008 world champion has spoken glowingly about Russia all weekend and always looked more comfortable than his title rival, Rosberg.
The Briton, who arrived in Russia early and spent some time in Moscow, has won eight of this season’s 15 races and is on a run of three successive victories. He leads the driver standings by 10 points with four races remaining and both men appreciate the margin for error is minuscule.
“An amazing job done by the team; constantly improving and moving forwards this year,” Hamilton said. “Thanks to them we’re able to be on the front row quite often. It’s great to come here. It’s a beautiful place and the weather has been amazing, so I’m really enjoying driving this track.”
Rosberg’s fastest lap under the Sochi sunshine was 0.2 seconds slower than Hamilton’s, but with a long straight down to Turn 1, he is well positioned to capitalise this afternoon.
“Lewis was quicker all weekend really,” Rosberg said. “So I’ve been working hard to try to get close, but didn’t manage to get closer than those two-10ths. That’s the way it is. I need to accept that. Also, I had Valtteri coming up from behind, going quick, so I needed to keep an eye on that. But front row is OK and from there everything is possible.”
Bottas was naturally frustrated with his last-gasp error because while it is unlikely his lap would have topped Hamilton’s, it would certainly have been enough to break Mercedes’ front-row dominance.
Today, Williams are unlikely to have the race pace to challenge for a win, while McLaren, Red Bull and Ferrari were all at least half a second off the pace.
“I didn’t know at that time that it was close to the pole,” Bottas said. “Maybe, looking back, I took a bit too much out of the tyres in the beginning of the lap and the last sector became a bit more tricky.
“I risked it a bit too much in the last two corners, went a little bit wide and when you go offline it’s really slippery.”
Should both Hamilton and Rosberg finish today’s 53-lap contest, it should seal Mercedes’s first constructors’ F1 title.
Hamilton described it as “a historic moment” while Rosberg, who has been with the marque since the 2010 launch, said it was strange to be on the cusp of achieving one of the team’s long-term objectives.
“It’s one of the two big targets for the team since five years now,” Rosberg said. “I’ve been there since day one and it’s very, very exciting to think that we’re so close to that now. That would be a really fantastic feat for us. I hope we manage to do it and it would be very special to win here again 100 years [after the last Russian race].”
In 1914, 12 of the 15 drivers on the start list were Russian, while today there is one. But Toro Rosso’s Daniil Kvyat, 20, gave his compatriots – thousands of which turned out to witness yesterday’s two on-track sessions – something to cheer about.
He finished fifth fastest, his strongest qualifying of his career, and is looking only forwards.
“It feels great securing P5 in my home country,” Kvyat said. “It was already looking quite promising on Friday, so I’m very happy we could put it all together and achieve my best qualifying result.
“The car felt very good and everything worked out well, so I’ll do my best in the race and definitely aim to finish at least fifth.”
Things did not go to plan for Sebastian Vettel, the four-time world champion.
The Red Bull Racing driver missed out on a place in the top-10 for the first time since the Austrian Grand Prix in June after struggling to get the best out of his car.
“We made a big step forward in the morning, but I wasn’t able to take that into qualifying,” he said after finishing 11th fastest. “Without different conditions, it will be very difficult to make much progress through the field.”
gmeenaghan@thenational.ae
3pm, Russian Grand Prix, beIN Sports
