Formula One world champion Sebastian Vettel chalked up his seventh pole position in eight races this season as Red Bull swept the front row in qualifying for the European Grand Prix yesterday.
Australian teammate Mark Webber was second fastest with McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton third and sharing the second row with Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso, racing in front of his home crowd.
Red Bull have now taken nine poles in a row dating back to the end of last year, the first team to do so since McLaren in 1998.
Their continued dominance seemed to make a mockery of suggestions that the champions could suffer from a clampdown by the governing body on the use of engine electronics and exhaust gases to influence performance.
“People expect us to lose more than others, but that’s where I disagree,” said the 23-year-old German, who will be chasing his sixth win of the year around the Mediterranean port city’s streets.
Vettel’s fastest lap of 1 minute, 36.975 seconds was the fastest ever in Valencia and made the pole a foregone conclusion with minutes still to run on a bright and breezy afternoon.
“I think, mate, we’ve said it enough. We’ve come here and we didn’t expect any different,” Webber, whose sole pole of the season so far came in Barcelona in May when Red Bull also swept the front row, said of the rule change. “Some other teams spoke a lot about it, maybe even some people in our team spoke a bit that maybe technically are not completely on top of things, but in the end we’ve just got on with our job, basically.”
Webber’s time was 0.188 seconds slower than his teammate’s, with Hamilton’s best effort a 1 minute, 37.380 seconds.
Brazilian Felipe Massa qualified fifth for Ferrari with McLaren’s Jenson Button, the winner in Canada two weeks ago, lining up sixth.
“It’s not very good. The car felt pretty good in Q2 [the second phase], but then in Q3 I had massive oversteer. I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t get any rear grip,” Button said. “The car was great this morning in practice, but with the heat maybe our balance isn’t working because of the track temperature. I just didn’t expect it. It’s not great but we’ll still have a good race.”
The second phase was red flagged and halted for four minutes after Venezuelan Pastor Maldonado’s Williams was left stranded on the track with what looked like an engine failure with 7 minutes, 59 seconds remaining.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier