• Nico was fastest in every practice session of the weekend prior to qualifying on pole this afternoon
Monaco, May 25, 2013 – Mercedes driver Nico Rosberg has claimed his third consecutive pole position – an achievement never matched by his 1982 world champion father Keke, who won in Monaco 30 years ago. Rosberg’s time of 1m13.876s was nearly half a second quicker than last year’s pole time – set by Michael Schumacher in a Mercedes – and marked the fourth pole in a row for the team, after a thrilling session.
A sprinkling of rain half an hour before the start of Q1 meant that the track was damp for the first time all weekend. All the drivers started the opening session on the Cinturato Green intermediate tyre as the rain fell harder, before easing off in the closing minutes. The fastest driver in Q1 was Williams driver Pastor Maldonado, on the intermediate, while Caterham’s Giedo van der Garde also used the intermediate to take his team into Q2 for the first time this year.
The rain continued in Q2, meaning that intermediates were once more the obvious choice. With just under five minutes to go the drivers began to switch to supersoft slick tyres, led by van der Garde. Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel was the fastest of the Q2 drivers on the supersoft, with a time set right at the end of the session.
The Q3 session was the only one where drivers were able to use slicks from the start, with all of them heading out on the supersoft. Pole position was decided in the closing seconds, with Rosberg taking pole from his team mate Lewis Hamilton.
Rosberg completed his domination of all the free practice sessions held at Monaco this year after going quickest by seven-tenths of a second in FP3 this morning on the P Zero Red supersoft.
Nico Rosberg-It’s a great feeling to be on pole in the city where I grew up and it means so much to me to drive through the streets here in a Silver Arrow. The conditions were really difficult out there today with the rain at the start but we handled it well. I have to say thank you to everybody at the team for all of their hard work in improving our car and our performance so much since last year. Having said that, we know that race pace has been our weakness. We’ve learnt a lot since the last race, and this track should suit us, but we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out if this will be enough.
Lewis Hamilton- Congratulations to Nico and the team today, a great job all round. It’s a big improvement for me after struggling in the practice sessions here so I’m really happy to be on the front row of the grid. I didn’t have a great first sector on my lap today but after that it really came together. I’ve got some work to do as I haven’t felt completely comfortable in the car this weekend but I’m confident that we can have a good race tomorrow and we’ll be aiming to get the best possible result for the team.
Sebastian Vettel – “I think generally it was okay. Unfortunately we lost quite a lot of time in the afternoon while we were making some changes, but that can happen on Friday, or in this case Thursday. We’d like to be a little bit more competitive, so we need to try and find some more lap time. We had a KERS issue this afternoon, so I didn’t use the system during P2. The guys know what the problem was with that.”
