Australian Mark Webber seized pole position for the South Korean Formula One Grand Prix yesterday with title-chasing Red Bull teammate Sebastian Vettel having to settle for second place on the starting grid.
Ferrari’s championship leader Fernando Alonso qualified fourth and will share the second row with McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton.
Alonso leads double world champion Vettel by four points with five races, including today’s, remaining this season. Webber is 60 points off the lead.
“The target was to start from the second or third row at least and we have. Now we focus on the race,” Ferrari team principal Stefano Domenicali said.
The pole was Webber’s first proper one of the season, although he also started from the top slot in Monaco, after Mercedes’ Michael Schumacher was demoted five places, and it was a surprise after Vettel had dominated practice.
“We have a pretty handy car around here, for sure,” Webber said after Red Bull’s second front-row lockout in two races. “The guys have been working very hard and the hard work is paying off.”
Vettel had been comfortably fastest in both the first two parts of qualifying, but missed out right at the end when he was surprised to find Ferrari’s Felipe Massa still on the track ahead of him.
“I don’t want to blame it on Felipe,” said Vettel, who will still be favorite to win at a circuit where the driver on pole has yet to win in the two years of the race’s existence, of his last run.
“I thought he was coming in [to the pits] and then in the last sector he was right in front of me so I had to back off. Not ideal when just starting a timed lap,” Vettel said.
The German was earlier heard angrily asking his team, who had informed him that his lap was not good enough, why he was not told about Massa.
“What was I supposed to say?” the race engineer said.
In an eventful qualifying session, Hamilton had to take avoiding action in the pit lane when Nico Rosberg was released into his path after he had left the garage in the final phase. McLaren teammate Jenson Button is to start 11th.
“It’s going to be very tough to get ahead of them [Webber and Vettel],” Hamilton said. “These guys have clearly made a very big step.”
However, McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh said that he was hopeful his drivers had the long-run pace to challenge the Red Bulls.
Finland’s Kimi Raikkonen, third overall in the championship, qualified fifth for Lotus, with Massa alongside him.
French teammate Romain Grosjean starts seventh, with Germany’s Nico Hulkenberg eighth on the grid for Force India. The Mercedes pair of Rosberg and Michael Schumacher shared the fifth row.
“Hopefully tomorrow is going to be a good day for me. I need to get through the first lap without incident,” said Grosjean, who collided with Webber at the start in Japan last weekend and was banned for the Italian Grand Prix for taking out Alonso at the first corner in Belgium.
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