21/05/2009
NEWS STORY
Romain Grosjean dominated this afternoon's qualifying session in Monaco with a stunning display of speed and precision as he smashed the previous lap record for the series to claim pole position for tomorrow's feature race ahead of teammate Vitaly Petrov and Nico Hulkenberg.
The Frenchman set an early fastest lap and then improved it again on the ten minute mark, and just to rub salt into his rivals' wounds he went even quicker with two minutes remaining to set a best time of 1:19.498 just as his teammate got to within half a second of his best time.
Pastor Maldonado and Andreas Zuber were scrapping for the top spot early in the session until Grosjean stormed in with an untouchable lead. Initially it looked as though the time had stunned the pitlane into silence, but eventually his rivals came back and chipped away at his time, first Luca Filippi, then Zuber, then Jerome d'Ambrosio until, with a few minutes remaining, the floodgates opened.
Petrov, Hulkenberg, Lucas di Grassi and Zuber all improved their times in the final two minutes until Grosjean went even quicker: on the final lap of the session he went out again, just in case, but after setting another fastest first sector he slowed down, knowing the job was done.
Behind the top three were Zuber, di Grassi, Alvaro Parente, d'Ambrosio and Filippi, but while the battle for second was fierce there was no doubt that Grosjean had claimed his second pole position of the season.