Hello everyone and welcome back to the WTF one podcast today. It's just myself and Tommy,

there's no Matt, he's at British Choring Cars, but we're recording a podcast on me on a Sunday morning

which feels so unnatural. Yeah, it does feel really strange. You've said this is the first time you

kind of covered one of these races and equally for me last year we had a lot of European rounds

and even the rounds in like Bahrain were still at a reasonable time for us. I can hear every

Australian person ranting it as now saying, oh boo, you've got to watch the race at 10 pm,

well I get at 3 am, totally understand that. It's just very unusual that it feels like a very

long time since we had a race and qualifying in all these sessions, not at our normal lunch time.

So yeah, we thought we'd do a little early morning pod for us and then people can listen to it

before the race. Exactly, like you say with coronavirus we've had such a European central calendar

since 2020, so that now we've actually expanded and gone elsewhere. Like you say, it's it's

strange to have such late qualifying but nevertheless it was a great qualifying, it was worth staying

up for for us guys in Europe because Max for Stappen, he put it on pole which I'm going to be honest,

I don't know about you Tommy, but I wasn't expecting that. I thought Kota, this is a Mercedes

track, Mercedes have put it on pole here every single year in the hybrid era. I was like,

this is easily a Lewis Hamilton pole or Valtteri Bottas pole but Max for Stappen was like,

not today. Yes, I was very surprised. I think all of us in our prediction, I decided to be

different and put Bottas pole but we all said Mercedes would be pole in our predictions and I think

a lot of people thought the same thing and then after Q1 it was high. Oh, the thing is with Mercedes

even when they're two attempts off just because they've been so dominant for so many years and

that they've been so good, you just never believe it do you and even when they're two

attempts off in Q1 it's like they're not turning their engine up yet or the sandbagging and

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