Friday form guide: focus on fight for second

The headline lap times from Friday's afternoon session at Monza suggest that this looks set to be a Red Bull walkover, just as resounding as at Spa two weeks ago.

Sebastian Vettel's best was over 0.6 seconds ahead of the best non-Red Bulls: the Lotus pair of Kimi Raikkonen and Romain Grosjean.

The longer runs suggest a similar picture, with Vettel's average on the option tyre almost 0.8s better than Grosjean's. We were in this situation on Friday at the Hungaroring, just as we were at Spa. In Hungary, things changed around on race day, but in Belgium they didn't.

The real giveaway of Red Bull's level of confidence is its choice of seventh-gear ratio. Just as in its dominant season of 2011, the team has opted for corner performance at the expense of straightline speed.

This is a choice that can only be made at Monza if you are very confident you're going to be starting from pole and will have enough of a laptime advantage that you're not going to be vulnerable at the end of the straights - and you estimate that those cars with faster end-of-straight speeds will not be able to get close enough to make it count.

The Red Bulls were reaching only 328km/h (203mph) through the speed trap before the braking zone for the first chicane. This put them near the very bottom of the trap list. The fastest cars were making around 334km/h (207mph).

Red Bull won't be caught on the straights even if rivals have better speed trap figures © XPB

Furthermore, so much faster are the Red Bulls coming out of Parabolica than the rest that it will be a long way down the straight before they're actually going faster than the distant Red Bulls.

The speeds from the start/finish line (around 300 metres on from the exit of Parabolica) have the Red Bull pair fastest at 314km/h (195mph) compared to 309km/h (192mph) for Lotus, Mercedes and Ferrari.

On this sort of low-downforce track, only when Red Bull is not confident of being able to set pole does it deviate from this gearing/wing-level strategy - as happened last year.

Looking at the average long-run times of the usual top four teams in greater detail we see the following picture:

MEDIUMS
Vettel    1m27.5s (9 laps)
Grosjean  1m28.3s (9 laps)
Raikkonen 1m28.6s (10 laps)
Webber    1m29.0s (14 laps)
Alonso    1m29.2s (12 laps)
Hamilton  1m29.5s (13 laps)

HARDS
Webber   1m28.3s (7 laps)
Vettel   1m28.5s (12 laps)
Rosberg  1m29.4s (17 laps)
Grosjean 1m29.6s (10 laps)
Massa    1m29.9s (8 laps)

Looking at the runs on the medium compound, the difference in times between Vettel, Grosjean and Raikkonen on the one hand, and Webber, Alonso and Hamilton on the other, appears to be excessive.

This would be consistent with the first three having a fuel load around 20kg lighter - or about the difference in fuel level between cars on one or two-stop strategies at the times of their tyre changes.

Expect a one-stop race © LAT

"The data suggests that it would have been a marginal one-stop today," said Pirelli's Paul Hembery, "and so we'd expect as the track evolves for the one-stop to become the favoured strategy."

On the medium tyres, teams were simply contingency planning for which of the two strategies may prevail.

Applying that suspected fuel-load difference would give the following order:

Vettel    1m27.5s
Webber    1m28.1s
Grosjean  1m28.3s
Alonso    1m28.3s
Raikkonen 1m28.6s
Hamilton  1m28.6s

In other words, the Lotus and Ferrari look very evenly matched as the next best after the Red Bull, Webber is struggling a little for pace compared to Vettel (although he did suffer a KERS problem that kept him in the garage for some time) and Mercedes is lagging behind a little - although on the hard tyres Nico Rosberg was actually next best after the Red Bulls, albeit around 1s adrift of them. Both Rosberg and team-mate Lewis Hamilton were struggling for braking stability.

It's very difficult to see past a Vettel victory on Sunday, but expect a good close scrap for second that could feature blue, red, black and even silver cars.