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Bottas was second and Vettel fifth, although Hamilton could only manage 10th this time. He seems to struggle on low-grip street tracks and is looking dodgy here, we'll have to wait and see if he can improve at all over the next 2 days.
Palmer meanwhile is looking like he's going to lose his drive with Renault mid-season, as the team are reportedly unhappy with his form, and crashing off in practice 2 will do him no favours either. He also had a bad, awkward interview with a BBC journalist yesterday which the team is reported to be unhappy over.
It's looking like it's going to be an interesting weekend.
Third practice later on this morning will be interesting, we will see if Hamilton can improve on his mediocre performances yesterday and if Red Bull can keep up their good form.
Hopefully the cars will grip a bit better today as some parts of practice yesterday descended into farce with cars going off the track and down the safety roads (or barriers).
This pole puts him ahead of Senna into 2nd for the most career poles, only two behind Schumacher which he will surely beat before the season is over.
Raikkonen was 3rd and Vettel 4th for an all-Ferrari 2nd row, so we should have an exciting, competitive start tomorrow. Here's hoping Hamilton keeps up his form from today and cuts Vettel's lead even further, or even manages to overtake him in the driver's standings.
Weather forecast is for it to be dry with sunshine so there's no need to worry about extra tyre changes due to rain, roll on 1pm!
Looking forward to the last half-hour or so!
Yellow flags, red flag, Vettel acting the idiot and then trying to blame it all on Hamilton, Riccardio and Bottas right at the back of the field after the start and somehow they manage to finish 1st and 2nd respectively.
Plenty of crashes, controversy, and excellent (and no so excellent) driving over the entire weekend made this a thoroughly enjoyable round.
As far as the Vettel/Hamilton incident goes, Vettel was clearly in the wrong. Hamilton was at the front behind the pace car and as such it was his right to dictate the pace. Vettel first of all simply made a mistake and assumed Hamilton would accelerate away out of the corner so accelerated himself and ended up crashing into the back of Hamilton. Pure accident there.
However what he did next was way out of line, coming up alongside Hamilton and deliberately sideswiping him. It wouldn't surprise me if he took a leaf out of Schumacher's book, realized he'd damaged his car and would need to pit, so tried to deliberately damage Hamilton's car so he'd have to come in to the pits as well.
He was lucky to get away with a stop-go 10 second penalty and 3 points on his licence. Hopefully he'll get 3 more points soon and be banned for a race.
Roll on Hungary in just under 2 weeks time!
Hopefully they'll hit him with more punishment, the fact that the officials didn't disqualify him during the race because "they didn't want to interfere in the title race" is a disgrace.
The stewards at Baku have said they were in no doubt that Vettel deliberately swerved into Hamilton so we'll have to wait and see if anything further happens over the incident.
It's not surprising really, after he was ousted as Chief Executive last November after falling out with other major shareholders it was really only a matter of time before he left the team altogether.
He'll be a big loss to F1 after the success he had over the year, overseeing 10 driver's championships with Lauda, Prost, Senna, Hakkinen, and Hamilton. Unfortunately he'll also be known as being the driving force behind the currently disastrous engine deal with Honda.
Will this be a catalyst for a revolution for McLaren and propel them back to the top of the sport where they belong? Only time will tell.