Australian Mark Webber completed an impressive hat-trick of pole positions yesterday when he clocked the fastest time for Red Bull in qualifying for today’s Turkish Grand Prix.
The 33-year-old drivers’ championship leader, winner of the last two races in Spain and Monaco, has now claimed four poles this season and five in his career — and the Red Bull team have taken all seven this season.
He will be chasing a hat-trick of victories in today’s 58-lap race in a bid to jump clear at the top of the scrap for the drivers’ title.
Webber is currently leading on 78 points level with his 22-year-old German teammate Sebastian Vettel, who qualified third behind 2008 champion Lewis Hamilton of McLaren.
Hamilton’s fully-committed effort meant he split the Red Bull pace-setters and claimed a front row start for the first time this year.
Webber was satisfied after a struggle to find a good set-up at the Istanbul Park circuit.
“It hasn’t been the smoothest of weekends for us in terms of getting the running in. Getting ready for ‘quali,’ things started to get a little bit better,” Webber said.
Hamilton’s McLaren teammate and defending champion Jenson Button was fourth ahead of German comeback kid Michael Schumacher, who span off the circuit and into the gravel on his final fast lap in qualifying.
“Fourth is not too bad, but the last lap was frustrating. Being the last car is sometimes a good thing, but there’s more chance of someone going off ahead — and Michael Schumacher went off in front of me,” Button said.
Schumacher’s Mercedes teammate and fellow German, Nico Rosberg, was sixth ahead of Pole Robert Kubica of Renault, with Brazilian Felipe Massa eighth for Ferrari. His teammate, Spain’s Fernando Alonso, was only down in 12th.
Kubica’s Renault teammate Vitaly Petrov of Russia was ninth and Japan’s Kamui Kobayashi was 10th for Sauber.
In Q2, the shock was in seeing Ferrari’s two-times world champion Fernando Alonso failing to make the cut to the top 10 shoot-out.
“I pushed very hard in that lap. Anyway, I was slower than my fastest lap. I knew it was not enough,” Alonso said. “I did three laps in mainly the same time and I think the pace was not there.”
That left Ferrari team principal Stefano Domenicali baffled — that a world champion could not qualify in the top 10 on the weekend of Ferrari’s 800th race celebrations was not good enough or acceptable.
“For sure the performance in qualifying was not up to our standard. We don’t know why — and we need to understand,” he said.
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