2015 F1 Championship In the Bag, Hamilton Eases Off

With the 2015 F1 Championship already in the hands of Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Vettel grabbed headlines in an otherwise boring practice session on Friday, in the season ending race at Abu Dhabi. To be perfectly honest, practice sessions are generally snooze-fests apart from the odd shunt. But, Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel decided to liven things up by singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to his race engineer in Italian.

Hamilton topped the first practice session with teammate Rosberg in 2nd with Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen 3rd fastest. In the second session, the top 2 had reversed and it was Force India’s Sergio Perez in 3rd. In the final session, the top 2 maintained status quo and Vettel in the second Ferrari was 3rd.

In qualifying, the biggest upset was when Sebastian Vettel was knocked out of Q1 along with Fernando Alonso, Marcus Ericsson and the 2 Manors of Will Stevens and Roberto Merhi. In Q2, Toro Rosso’s Max Verstappen was knocked out along with Jenson Button, Pastor Maldonado, Felipe Nasr and Romain Grosjean. Finally, at the end of Q3, Nico Rosberg lead a Mercedes front row lockout with Kimi Raikkonen in 3rd alongside Sergio Perez.

With regard to the race, Nico kept the lead from the start while Hamilton was slower away but kept 2nd. At the end of 55 laps, Rosberg dominated with an 8-second lead from teammate Hamilton. Raikkonen was 3rd ahead of Vettel who fought his way up the order. Daniel Ricciardo was 6th, sandwiched between the 2 Force India’s of Perez and Nico Hulkenberg respectively. Felipe Massa, Romain Grosjean and Daniil Kvyat completed the top 10. Carlos Sainz Jr, Jenson Button, Valtteri Bottas, Marcus Ericsson, Felipe Nasr, Max Verstappen, Fernando Alonso, Will Stevens and Roberto Merhi completed the rest of the race finishers. Pastor Maldonado was the only retirement of the race after opening lap contact with Fernando Alonso. With that, the 2015 F1 Championship was done and dusted.