Montreal Quali, Season 5: New and Exciting
Or maybe not. Certainly there wasn't a wealth of surprises at qualifying in Canada.
To everyone's complete lack of surprise, Renault continued to steamroll with Domingues - championship leader - grabbing 1st, and Beyens qualifying in 3rd.
In between them is a McLaren driven by Hutchinson. McLaren has always had decent qualifying and it should not be a shock they have a driver on the front row.
Rounding off row 2 is Dubois of Williams who did predictably well in qualifying for his home race, and we can certainly expect him to score a middling amount of points.
Davidson is in 5th place in the Ferrari, which would place him in decent shape for the race. He has a shot of closing up in the championship if he does not unsurprisingly get taken out like he has the last two races.
Shepherd is 6th in a standard high-qualifying session for the Aguri, and it can be expected that he will place somewhere in the bottom of the top ten tommorow and still be pleased about it.
Whitcomb and Kawasie (of BMW Sauber and Midland) make up row 4 and there's not really much to be said about any of them.
Weiland had an extremely botched first lap and then the high-tech Aguri unimpressively failed to go out for the second run, leaving the Aguri relatively far back in 9th place. The 2nd Midland of LeSabre starts 10th.
Lovett (Williams) and Morely (BMW) have combined for a whopping total of zero points this season. They will both start from row 6 in that order but it can be completed expected that they will do very little and sink to the back, or perhaps retire.
Allman will start 13th in the second Ferrari, which is completely not a shock given his sudden tendency to go take a couple of pitgirls to his trailer and promptly forget to change tires.
Butler starts from 14th for the Red Bull. He has won one race this season but the rest of the time he's been completely not paying attention.
Mason will start 15th in a predictably rubbish start for Toyota's #1.
Charkaoui in Honda #2 has not had a huge impact in his return season and so it shouldn't come as a shock that he qualified on intermediates.
Syme, racing for Red Bull will start 17th for no good reason at all. Unsurprisingly.
Honda's Horton will predictably start from a junk position in 18th after doing good in the previous race, and plans on continuing his polar season.
Chang will start from actually the inside of the back row, which is surprising, except for the fact he is driving a McLaren. Which predictably justifies his "accident", which obviously was the end result of an unsurprising engine failure.
Finally, Graham in the Toyota will start dead last after the crew unwittingly gave him a RAV4 instead of a Formula 1 car.
Certainly for the race in Montreal we can expect an extremely dull race with Renault running away with it, Ferrari throwing the season away, and perhaps a mixture of lesser points finishers, with the race dotted by a smattering of retirements from drivers from Midland and Toyota since they're not doing anything useful anyway.
But feel free to prove me wrong.
