Saturday 15 October 2011

Champ Off Pole

He might be the newly crowned World Champion, but Sebastian Vettel isn't going to get his own way for the rest of the season. He remains on the front grid but he is, at last, not on Pole. McLaren had again been the faster team in practice and this time Hamilton was able to continue this trend. He was quickest in both Q1 and Q2 and then secured Pole. Button provides the McLaren sandwich in third with Webber providing a Red Bull sandwich in fourth. Massa again manages to out-qualify Alonso as the Ferraris line up side by side but can the Brazilian actually out race his team-mate. Despite a crash in practice yesterday, Rosberg was able to compete today and qualified in seventh ahead of Petrov. The two Force India cars both made it into Q3 but neither driver completed a lap. Di Resta will start ninth because he did actually leave the pits in Q3.

The surprise exit in Q2 was Schumacher who will start behind Alguersuari but ahead of Buemi in twelfth. After a great qualification last week, Kobayashi could only make fourteenth with Senna also disappointing in fifteenth. Maldonado had just squeezed into Q2 at his team mate's expense and managed to finish sixteenth with Perez seventeenth.

The surprise in Q1 wasn't necessarily the seventh driver to be eliminated but the fact that Red Bull had decided to go out on a set of super soft tyres. They're normally used in Q3 by the bigger teams but Red Bull wanted to do some race testing for their potential three stop strategy in tomorrow's race. Barrichello continued his miserable and rumoured last season with qualification of eighteenth. Kovalainen yet again out qualifies Trulli in the Lotus battle for nineteenth and twentieth. Glock also continued his dominance over D'Ambrosio in the Virgin battle for twenty-first. Ricciardo failed to make it out of the pits due to a technical failure, allowing Liuzzi to qualify in the penultimate position of twenty-third.

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