Qualifying verses race pace at the Spanish GP

Mark Webber's pole time at the Spanish Grand Prix was almost a second ahead of the first non-Red Bull car - Lewis Hamilton's McLaren, but in the race the McLarens seemed to be at least as fast as Red Bulls, if not a tiny bit faster. From browsing internet discussion forums it seems like most people believe the Red Bull again was disproportionately quick in qualifying compared to its race pace. That would make indeed make sense from looking at qualifying versus race pace in 2010 and so far in 2011. But I'm not sure that was the case at the Spanish Grand Prix.

The reason is simple: Sebastian Vettel lapped the entire field apart from his team mate and the two McLarens. The race had 66 laps and the leaders averaged a bit under 90 seconds per lap. That means you would need to be at least 1.35 seconds faster per lap than the car you lap. Fernando Alonso was just under a second slower than Webber's pole lap, but even though he held Vettel and Hamilton up for the first 18 laps he got lapped by both of them. Nico Rosberg was 1.6 seconds off pole and got lapped on lap 47. And these aren't even the most extreme examples. Vitaly Petrov was a tenth faster than Rosberg in qualifying but got lapped around 42-43 and finished way behind the Mercs. He might have had some problems, but to me it looks like he had a pretty clean race.

Overall the Red Bull kept its pace advantage in qualifying compared to most of the other teams. The only logical conclusion from this is that McLaren and Red Bull are miles ahead of anyone else and McLaren fucked up their qualifying, or they're a bit slower overall than Red Bull but focused a lot more on race pace than qualifying. Hopefully we'll be able to make some more sense of this later in the season. After all, the Barcelona track is considered to be one of the best benchmarks for which car is actually the fastest; hence it's popularity as a testing track. (Well, that and its location.) If McLaren have indeed caught up with Red Bull we might actually have an exciting title battle after all, but this is very ominous for the likes of Ferrari and Mercedes.