Vettel dominates qualifying in Australia

Vettel started his title defence with a pole position on the qualifying for the Australian GP. The German was the quickest driver on all the three legs. This was the 16th pole position of Vettel’s F1 career.

After being the fastest driver during Q1 and Q2, in Q3 Sebastien Vettel made a lap of 1m23.529s, which at the end of the session left him with an advantage of almost 0.8 seconds over Hamilton.

The British driver managed to put himself between the Red Bulls on his final effort on Q3 to prevent a clean sweep on the first line from the world champion manufacturer. Mark Webber was third with a time of 1m24.395s, just 0.088s slower than the McLaren driver.

Jenson Button completed the second row with his McLaren, while Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso only managed to make the 5th fastest lap. After poor practicing Lotus Renault’s Vitaly Petrov was surprising in 6th. The Russian was ahead of the first Mercedes from Nico Rosberg. The German team failed to make its resurgence indicated by the final tests in Barcelona, as Michael Schumacher failed even to make it to Q3, being the first driver of Q2’s cut-off.

Massa on the second Ferrari was 8th, while the top ten was completed by Kobayashi and Buemi who proved that Sauber and Toro Rosso’s improvements during winter were for real. Their team-mates Alguersuari and Sergio Perez were 12th and 13th.

On their grand prix debut Force India's Paul di Resta and Williams's Pastor Maldonado will start in 14th and 15th place, ahead of their team-mates after mistakes by both Adrian Sutil and Rubens Barrichello.

On the other Renault, Nick Heidfeld didn’t manage to make it to Q2 and will be starting the Australian GP in 18th place. At the back of the pack last year’s new teams didn’t show much of an improvement, as they were far away from contention. Lotus was the quickest, ahead of Virgin, with Hispania not making the 107 per cent cut and now having to rely on the kindness o the rest of the field in order to have a place on tomorrow’s grid.

107% time: 1m31.266s