Qualifying at the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve

Five minutes before Q1 was to start, the rain began. Even with light rain falling, all drivers attempted to get away with supersoft tyres for a lap when the lights went green. Within the first few laps, Kimi Räikkönen slid his Lotus straight over the grass at Turn 2, while Max Chilton spun his Marussia at the hairpin. By laps three, all o the drivers came in for intermediates. And the rest of the session was run on the inters despite the track continuing to dry, but drizzle prevented anyone switching to slicks.

With the times steadily dropping, it was all about who could improve late on. But both Paul di Resta and Romain Grosjean failed to get clean laps in and were unable to improve enough on their final laps as the rain intensified slightly.

After an amazing first qualifying session the six that hed been eliminated were:

17) Paul Di Resta 1:24.908s
18) Charles Pic 1:25.626s
19) Romain Grosjean 1:25.716s
20) Jules Bianchi 1:26.508s
21) Max Chilton 1:27.602s
22) Giedo van der Garde 1:27.110s

It seemed that conditions deteriorated further for Q2, which was stopped with a red flag with 1:59s to go when Felipe Massa got Turn 3 wrong and ended up broadsided into the tyre wall.

When the session finally was restarted (at 13.47) there was a fight not unlike the first lap of a race as everyone tried to make it back round in time to record single flying laps. Hamilton did it best, jumping to first place with 1:27.649s. But with very little time left in Q2, many of the drivers appeared to be pushing to hard and a large majority of them were cutting the final chicane, thus losing their flying laps times.

With only a few time jumps in the final moments of Q2, the list of eliminated drivers after the session were:

11) Nico Hülkenberg 1:29.435s
12) Sergio Perez 1:29.761s
13) Pastor Maldonado 1:29.917s
14) Jenson Button 1:30.068s
15) Esteban Gutiérrez 1:30.315s
16) Felipe Massa 1:30.354s

So it all came down to Q3, The Top Ten Shootout. As the conditions showed very little signs of a large improvement, intermediates remained the tyre of the day. And in the end, it all came down to what each driver was able to managed in their first runs in Q3. As the drivers never got the tyres up to temperatures in the final sector (once they had all swapped to new intermediates).

As the rain started to fall more steadily in the final five minutes of Q3, (preventING any further improvements). The Top Ten Shootout ended with Nico Rosberg having to settle for fourth ahead of Mark Webber and Fernando Alonso. It was a good session for Vettel as his other title rival - Kimi Raikkonen - only lines up ninth. 

That left Sebastian Vettel fastest but just as it appeared that Lewis Hamilton was on course to beat Vettel's time, Hamilton missed the turn in to the final corner (missing the chicane) and he lost the lap time, leaving him sitting in P2 for tomorrows race. It was Valtteri Bottas that surprised everyone today. With 2013 being this rookies first year in F1, it has only taken six races for the Finn to make it onto the second row at race start.

Well done Valtteri and Williams!

Sebastian Vettel	P1
Lewis Hamilton	P2
Valtteri Bottas	P3
Nico Rosberg	P4
Mark Webber	P5
Fernando Alonso	P6
Jean-Éric Vergne	P7
Adrian Sutil	P8
Kimi Räikkönen	P9
Daniel Ricciardo	P10
Nico Hülkenberg	P11
Sergio Perez	P12
Pastor Maldonado	P13
Jenson Button	P14
Esteban Gutiérrez	P15
Felipe Massa	P16
Paul di Resta	P17
Charles Pic	P18
Romain Grosjean	P19
Jules Bianchi	P20
Max Chilton	P21
Giedo van der Garde	P22

Q1 107% Time 1:28.080


Note - Grosjean qualified 19th; penalized 10 grid spots for causing collision at previous round. Räikkönen  and Ricciardo qualified ninth and tenth respectively; penalized two grid spots each for pit-exit infringements.