Track Torque: Stars and stripes time …
The race starts at 8pm this Sunday (21st) with qualifying at a similar time on Saturday.
We are off to Austin, Texas for an exciting race at the Circuit Of The America’s in Travis county. The track is a long one at 5,5km with 20 corners.
Last year’s winner, Lewis Hamilton was in pole position last time around but Sebastian Vettel holds the lap record there at 01:18:80.
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Hamilton must therefore start as favourite but Ferrari are really desperate now to show that the Prancing Horse can never be defeated for long.
We shall see what Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen can do about it in ‘Wild West’ Texas.
Valtteri Bottas is in great form lately and can do the job but will Mercedes let him with so much at stake for Hamilton.
It should be a real ding-dong affair with Red Bull adding to the flavour from their two bulls, Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo.
I hope I am right about Honda’s comeback, so we should see both Brendon Hartley and Pierre Gasly well up in the mix, chasing the front runners.
Of course, they have to beat the very quick teams of both Haas and Force India before they can be in contention and that means that they have to beat Sergio Perez, Esteban Ocon, Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen.
Renault, with Nico Hulkenburg and on form Carlos Sainz, will also be chasing very hard for top 10 points.
The disappointments of the season so far are the McLaren Renaults of Fernando Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne and the Williams Mercedes team of Lance Stroll and Sergey Sirotkin.
Let’s hope they do better in America. There are really no ‘also rans’, with every team capable of putting one driver in the top 10 results, so we must not exclude the Sauber Alfa Romeo team from our projection.
The race starts at 8pm this Sunday (21st) with qualifying at a similar time on Saturday.
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