Vettel Leads Red Bull's One Two (Chinises Grand Prix Qualifying)

Red Bull used a special device to extract extra performance from their RB6 in qualifying for the Chinese Grand Prix.
He’s called Sebastian Vettel, and he’ll start from pole position for the third time this year in tomorrow’s race.

Q1

Heikki Kovalainen’s session got off to a bad start as he spun his Lotus at turn six.
As usual Lotus along with Virgin and HRT were the slowest cars in the first part of qualifying. Timo Glock won the ‘division two’ battle but was over two seconds slower than the only driver from the established teams to face elimination.
This week’s Q1 victim was Vitantonio Liuzzi, who once again blamed traffic for failing to get a sufficiently quick time.

Q2

Lewis Hamilton showed McLaren’s pace with the fastest time in Q2. He was the only person to lap in under 1m 35s and had half a second in hand over his team mate.
Between them were the two Red Bulls, both Ferraris and Nico Rosberg.
Michael Schumacher only narrowly made it into Q3, beating Rubens Barrichello by 0.033s.
Also eliminated were the Toro Rossos of Jaime Alguersuari and Sebastien Buemi, Vitaly Petrov, Kamui Kobayashi (who also gets a five-place penalty for a gearbox change), Nico Hülkenberg and Pedro de la Rosa.

Q3

From the moment Q3 began the performance McLaren had shown in practice and the first two parts of qualifying was no longer apparent.
All the top ten drivers used soft tyres for the session – but Sebastian Vettel found a quarter of a second more than his team mate, most of it with a very quick run through the final sector.
Behind Webber the next two rows of the grid were closely-fought. Fernando Alonso edged Rosberg by a hundredth of a second, and from Rosberg the two McLarens were covered by just a tenth of a second.
Having been off Hamilton’s pace for much of qualifying, Button turned the tables with his final effort, out-qualifying his team mate for the third time this year.
Felipe Massa lines up seventh ahead of Robert Kubica and Schumacher – the Mercedes driver seven tenths of a second slower than his team mate.
The finished the last race one-two and they did the same in Shanghai last year. Now Red Bull will start first and second for tomorrow’s Chinese Grand Prix.

Pos	No	Driver	Team	Q1	Q2	Q3	Laps
1	5	Sebastian Vettel	RBR-Renault	1:36.317	1:35.280	1:34.558	21
2	6	Mark Webber	RBR-Renault	1:35.978	1:35.100	1:34.806	17
3	8	Fernando Alonso	Ferrari	1:35.987	1:35.235	1:34.913	15
4	4	Nico Rosberg	Mercedes GP	1:35.952	1:35.134	1:34.923	17
5	1	Jenson Button	McLaren-Mercedes	1:36.122	1:35.443	1:34.979	17
6	2	Lewis Hamilton	McLaren-Mercedes	1:35.641	1:34.928	1:35.034	13
7	7	Felipe Massa	Ferrari	1:36.076	1:35.290	1:35.180	19
8	11	Robert Kubica	Renault	1:36.348	1:35.550	1:35.364	21
9	3	Michael Schumacher	Mercedes GP	1:36.484	1:35.715	1:35.646	21
10	14	Adrian Sutil	Force India-Mercedes	1:36.671	1:35.665	1:35.963	23
11	9	Rubens Barrichello	Williams-Cosworth	1:36.664	1:35.748		15
12	17	Jaime Alguersuari	STR-Ferrari	1:36.618	1:36.047		17
13	16	Sebastien Buemi	STR-Ferrari	1:36.793	1:36.149		17
14	12	Vitaly Petrov	Renault	1:37.031	1:36.311		10
15	23	Kamui Kobayashi	BMW Sauber-Ferrari	1:37.044	1:36.422		16
16	10	Nico Hulkenberg	Williams-Cosworth	1:37.049	1:36.647		14
17	22	Pedro de la Rosa	BMW Sauber-Ferrari	1:37.050	1:37.020		15
18	15	Vitantonio Liuzzi	Force India-Mercedes	1:37.161			9
19	24	Timo Glock	Virgin-Cosworth	1:39.278			6
20	18	Jarno Trulli	Lotus-Cosworth	1:39.399			9
21	19	Heikki Kovalainen	Lotus-Cosworth	1:39.520			8
22	25	Lucas di Grassi	Virgin-Cosworth	1:39.783			6
23	21	Bruno Senna	HRT-Cosworth	1:40.469			10
24	20	Karun Chandhok	HRT-Cosworth	1:40.578			7