Webber takes pole in rainy qualifying

Mark Webber guaranteed today his first pole postion of the season, the tird in-a-row for team Red Bull. The Australian was the fastest on the last qualifying session beating Nico Rosberg from Mercedes GP and his team-mate Sebastian Vettel.

The rain was a major upset for teams Ferrari and McLaren as a bad decision took them out in the first qualifying round. Both drivers of both teams will start the race tomorrow outside the top 16.

The Sepang circuit became wet just before the start of the qualifying, when rain started falling. The track was left sodden in places, slippery in others, but also had some sections almost dry.

Except for Sebastian Vettel that made an early exit to the track, the top four teams' drivers waited for the conditions to improve. The result was the opposite, becoming a bad option. Webber and the Mercedes drivers still managed to make good laps but Ferrari and McLaren didn't manage to qualify for the second round of the qualifying session.

The third qualifying round was halted after heavy rain started falling again in Sepang. The red flag came out before any of the drivers had completed a flying lap. Force India Adrian Sutil was the first to set the pace until Mark Webber in intermidiate tyres grabbed first position. In his third and final lap of qualifying the Australian would set the fastest time, 1.3 seconds ahead of the pack.

Nico Rosberg didn't allow Red Bull Racing to reach another front row clean sweep, as the Mercedes GP driver got second place ahead of Vettel, leaving Sutil in fourth place.

William's Hulkenberg managed to qualify in fifth place with the other third row spot going to Renault's Robert Kubica, that topped the first round of the qualifying. Former team mates Rubens Barrichello and Michael Shumacher will start in Sunday's race in the fourth row. They will be followed by Kamui Kobayashi, that gave Sauver the first top ten start of 2010, and Force India's Tonio Liuzzi.

With the mistakes made by Ferrari and McLaren, Lotus' Heikki Kovalainen and Virgin's Timo Glock managed to reach Q2 for the first time in their teams' history, as they will share row eight tomorrow. They will be starting behind Toro Rosso's Sebastien Buemi and Jaime Alguersuari that will occupy the seventh row and Russian driver Vitaly Petrov and Pedro de La Rosa that ended the qualifying session in eleventh and twelveth place, respectively.