2012 German Grand Prix grid

2012 German Grand Prix

Posted on

| Written by

Here is the provisional grid for the German Grand Prix:

Row 11. Fernando Alonso 1’40.621
Ferrari
2. Sebastian Vettel 1’41.026
Red Bull
Row 23. Michael Schumacher 1’42.459
Mercedes
4. Nico Hulkenberg 1’43.501
Force India
Row 35. Pastor Maldonado 1’43.95
Williams
6. Jenson Button 1’44.113
McLaren
Row 47. Lewis Hamilton 1’44.186
McLaren
8. Mark Webber* 1’41.496
Red Bull
Row 59. Paul di Resta 1’44.889
Force India
10. Kimi Raikkonen 1’45.811
Lotus
Row 611. Daniel Ricciardo 1’39.789
Toro Rosso
12. Kamui Kobayashi 1’39.985
Sauber
Row 713. Felipe Massa 1’40.212
Ferrari
14. Bruno Senna 1’40.752
Williams
Row 815. Jean-Eric Vergne 1’16.741
Toro Rosso
16. Heikki Kovalainen 1’17.62
Caterham
Row 917. Sergio Perez** 1’39.933
Sauber
18. Vitaly Petrov 1’18.531
Caterham
Row 1019. Romain Grosjean* 1’40.574
Lotus
20. Charles Pic 1’19.22
Marussia
Row 1121. Nico Rosberg* 1’41.551
Mercedes
22. Timo Glock 1’19.291
Marussia
Row 1223. Pedro de la Rosa 1’19.912
HRT
24. Narain Karthikeyan 1’20.23
HRT

*Five-place grid penalty for gearbox change.
**Five-place grid penalty for impeding Fernando Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen during qualifying.

2012 German Grand Prix

Browse all 2012 German Grand Prix articles

Author information

Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

Got a potential story, tip or enquiry? Find out more about RaceFans and contact us here.

51 comments on “2012 German Grand Prix grid”

  1. Wow, close to a German 1-2-3!

    1. it’s a 2-3-4

    2. yep, only need Ferrari to find a glitch on Alonso’s gearbox now to make it happen

      1. A lot of drivers starting out of position, so should be good to see them come through the field. Hope its also close at the front, but I just get that feeling that it wont be.

    3. And other two further back sharing Row 11…

  2. I think it might be a really interesting race tomorrow, lets see if Schumi can make use of their DRS to attack Vettel and Alonso. McLaren will need a bit of clever thinking as well as good driving and not cocking up in the pits to get a podium

    1. Well now they have a good opportunity to get confused in the pits.

    2. McLaren will need a bit of clever thinking as well as good driving and not cocking up in the pits to get a podium

      Unlike today, their strategy in hoping their only set of wets would get up into temperature didn’t pay off, they looked one of the quickest, If not the quickest in dry & intermediate conditions. Tomorrow should be dry (hopefully) with a mixed grid, let’s hope we get the race we truly deserve.

      1. Most certainly @younger-hamii, their speed in the dry looks to be certainly up to it.

    3. I thought MSC looked comparatively slow in dry conditions. I feel he got quite lucky with the rain. I expect he’ll be going backward though the field.

      1. Schumachers Q1 time on mediums was outright 3rd fastest of any medium runner, beaten only by Raikkonen & (just) by his teammate, & the latter was less than 1/10th of a second faster…..just saying…

  3. wow what bad luck for mclaren. the weekedn they turn up with a quick car, it rains.

    1. Good news is tomorrow will be dry but certainly winning would be quite hard.

  4. It seems the performance order is very changeable. Red Bull was not so fast in Q1 which was dry but they were mighty in wet Q2 and Q3. Mclaren, Lotus looked better than Red Bull in Q1 but they fell down in wet sessions. I think Ferrari was the most consistent one. It would be interesting how much Red Bull is fast(or slow?) tomorrow.

  5. I don’t envy Nico Hulkenberg. He’s got Alonso and Vettel in front of him, and they’re pointed squarely at the very tricky Nordkurve and both are probably going to be making aggressive starts. And behind him is Pastor Maldonado, who by virtue of Mark Webber’s penalty, has been promoted to the clean side of the grid …

    1. And Schumi is one determined guy next to him too. Might indeed get tight at the start, he will do well to keep out of trouble from the grid.

    2. And you say Maldonado, aggressive? Hamilton behind him? Oh dear!

    3. @prisoner-monkeys – After so little dry running I don’t think there will be any significant advantage on starting on the racing line.

  6. Top 6 are from 6 different teams.NICE.

    1. and it seems mixed. Great.

  7. matthewf1 (@)
    21st July 2012, 14:58

    Grosjean and Rosberg should be 20th and 22nd, surely, from 15th and 17th

    1. @matthewf1 @sato113 Not necessarily. The way penalties are applied, you don’t just add five onto someone’s position and move everyone else up. They are applied turn by turn “in the order the offences were committed” (Sporting Regulations article 36.2c).

      Assuming they will be applied in the order we learned about them (i.e. Grosjean, Rosberg, Webber) that moves Grosjean from 15th to 20th, promoting Rosberg to 16th, who then takes his penalty and falls to 21st, promoting Grosjean to 19th.

      It may be that the penalties are applied in a different order – we’ll find out when the FIA publishes the timings of the three penalties. If Rosberg’s penalty is applied before Grosjean’s then they will start 22nd and 20th respectively.

      Perhaps the most complicated example of this was at Suzuka in 2009 where seven drivers had five-place penalties. Among those were Rubens Barrichello who qualified fifth and still started sixth despite a five-place penalty:

      2009 Japanese Grand Prix grid

      1. And now Perez gets a penalty too – we might beat the Suzuka record yet…

        1. @KeithCollantine and now the two Red Bull drivers are under investigation! Could Webber get two qualifying penalties in a single event?

      2. @keithcollantine the Suzuka grid remained a mystery for me till I read ur post explaining how they do it. Thx

        1. @malleshmagdum You’re welcome.

          It is a bit daft though and I fully understand people assuming you just add the positions onto each driver’s starting positions and move everyone else up. I’m not quite sure why it’s done that way.

          Perhaps it’s because you get grid penalties of different sizes (e.g. five or ten places) which could end up with some drivers having to occupy the same position.

          1. @keithcollantine Its probably to complicate an already complicated sport :p. Btw teams change gear ratios every race, so what does ‘penalty for changing gearbox’ mean?
            I referred the RBR Manual I won here last season, it doesnt explain much

          2. Most sites saying Grosjean 20 & Rosberg 22

            formula1.com’s qualifying analysis has:
            Romain Grosjean, 1m 40.574s, P15, will start P20
            Nico Rosberg, 1m 41.551s, P17, will start P21
            Not sure how they worked those positions out!!

          3. @jennikate @malleshmagdum @sato113 @matthewf1

            OK according to the FIA penalties the times the offences were committed are as follows:

            11:00 Webber
            11:00 Grosjean
            11:04 Rosberg
            14:39 Perez

            It doesn’t matter that Webber and Grosjean’s offences are simultaneous as the pair aren’t close enough on the grid for it to be a problem.

            As expected and explained above, Grosjean’s penalty is registered first and he drops from 15th to 20th, temporarily promoting Rosberg to 16th. But when Rosberg’s penalty is added he falls to 21st, promoting to Grosjean to 19th.

            Perez’s penalty is applied last and makes no difference to Grosjean and Rosberg.

            If other people are coming up with different grids it’d be interesting to see how they’ve arrived at them because this is the only one that makes sense to me at the moment. Again, the Japan example (above) is very useful.

          4. @keithcollantine – Autosport agree with you :)
            As you’ve said, the regulations state pretty clearly that penalties are applied in the order they’re given so I can only imagine the other sites think Rosberg’s should be applied first for some reason.

          5. @jennikate @malleshmagdum @sato113 @matthewf1 The FIA have published the provisional starting grid which matches the one published here.

      3. Wow Keith! Never knew about the “order of offence committed” sequence. Thanks!

        A small doubt. What happens during a gearbox penalty? I mean, Rosberg’s and Romain’s gearboxes did not fail on-track. So, the time of offence here is the time at which the team notified the FIA about the failed gear-box? And not when the gear-box actually failed?

  8. If it is a dry race, then I think Michael Schumacher will decide the outcome of this race.
    The Mercedes doesn’t have the pace but it has top speed and Michael who can do a robust defence.

    Alonso and Webber managed to escape Michael in Silverstone and everyone who was behind him got their races compromised.

    Although with Pastor in close company of Michael, I wouldn’t discount a safety car :)

    1. I think Maldonado if misses Schumaher will take out Button or Kimi this race in lap one

      1. Actually it could be part of the race predictions ?

    2. davidnotcoulthard
      22nd July 2012, 8:57

      Trulli Schumi Train?

  9. Lovely Grid, sure to provide an interesting first lap.

    For the race however, the commentators failed to mention quite a considerable factor I thought which was who had the dial on their cars setup pointed furthest to the “Faster in the Wet” mode. No doubt, nobody would of ran a full wet setup but how much of a wet setup did some drivers shoot for?

    From my non professional racing experience, you can set the car up to be on the absolute limit in a specific condition, but as soon as it touches water or a dramatic temperature change the car quickly becomes the most difficult thing to drive, ‘snapping’ if you like. I remember races where the drivers with their cars setup in a way which was very forgiving would always shine when the conditions on the track worsened and the lead pack of two or three drivers that were a good 3 tenths quicker than the rest all the time would just perish.

    But I’m probably over thinking it and it just came down to who put in a clean lap.

    1. @prof-kirk

      the commentators failed to mention quite a considerable factor I thought which was who had the dial on their cars setup pointed furthest to the “Faster in the Wet” mode.

      Since the new aerodynamic regulations came in three years ago the differences between the two have narrowed considerably. And with everyone expecting dry weather tomorrow it’s likely few have made any significant concessions towards wet running.

  10. Button starts ahead of Hamilton for the third time this season. Why did I check? Because I thought it was for the first time…

    On a personal note, today in the Midlands (UK) is the first dry day in over a month. That’s 30 consecutive wet days, in the middle of summer. Silverstone’s developers must consider a roof for the future.

    1. @tribaltalker,

      A few memories stand out of our family vacation in the UK in the summer of ’93. The first is that for all of the four weeks we were there, there was only one completely dry day. A second memory is watching the German Grand Prix at (the proper) Hockenheim, and listening to Murray Walker say “..and Damon Hill is on his way to his first victory”, when someone else who was also watching said “shut up, Murray!”. Sure enough, two laps before the end his tyre blew.

  11. I dont think drivers should get punished for mechanical failures. Diabolical penalties.

    1. Drivers and teams win and lose together. If a driver is leading a race by a minute, and then crashes on the last lap at the final corner, the team doesn’t get the points they were almost guaranteed anyway, they lose them the just like the driver.

      The driver is part of the a team, they are in it together. When a driver makes a mistake, the team suffers. When a team makes a mistake the driver suffers.

  12. I saw some quotes from Alonso about not even being able to run in 7th gear on the straights during Q3 and not being able to use KERS at all!

    1. Now he’s just showing off xD Next race he’ll get pole with no wheels!

    2. Then they must have a huge end 6th as he said he did 280/290 kph before T6, the other thing is, if he had no KERS, there is no way he could have get pole, as it defines brake balance too, but if he had KERS Im sure he used it, just not out of the corner, but on the straights. Ergo just showoff.

    3. Maybe -apparently – not so big a problem in the rain: how much do you use 7th? Maybe you’re even faster when you’re approaching eg the hairpin a bit slower. That’s what it looked like with Hamilton, if I remember correctly.
      Kers? How much wheelspin do you need? Brake balance can be adjusted, so all in all not so spectacular as when his gearbox was broken in Malaysia or was it China.
      And of course we once had Schumacher using the pitlimiter as kind of tractioncontrol in Spa. @BasCB but still an incredible lap!

    4. From the pole lap video we can see clearly that he uses 7th and kers.

      http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/formula1/18940100

      1. Clearly. He must have forgotten!

    5. Those were Mark Webber’s quotes:

      Webber said: “It was a very intense, tricky session for the drivers and engineers. It was a challenge for us. Sometimes to be in seventh gear wasn’t possible, to use the Kers wasn’t possible. When you have wheelspin at 180mph it certainly gets your attention.

Comments are closed.