Formula One championship leader Sebastian Vettel roared to pole position at the Indian Grand Prix yesterday as Red Bull flexed their muscles with a third successive one-two sweep in qualifying.
Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso, Vettel’s closest challenger and six points behind the 25-year-old German with four races remaining including today’s, starts fifth at the Buddh International Circuit.
“All in all it was a great weekend so far. No problems with the car. The boys have been pushing extremely hard,” Vettel said, his title momentum seemingly unstoppable, after beating Webber by 0.044 seconds.
“You know the races these days, you know that a lot of things can happen, I don’t think that means a lot,” he cautioned of his advantage over Alonso.
Vettel won from pole in the inaugural Indian race last year and looked comfortable again on a hot and hazy afternoon at the track south of Delhi, chalking up his fifth pole of the season and 35th of his career.
The double champion completed just 13 laps to Alonso’s 21 and Hamilton’s 23 and, unless some misfortune halts him in his tracks, can be expected to run away with a fourth successive win today.
He was joined on the front row by Australian teammate Mark Webber, who might have snatched pole for the second race in a row but for a mistake on turn three. It was the first time Red Bull have managed a hat-trick of front row sweeps.
“On the last corner, I got a little on the Astroturf on the exit and didn’t have the cleanest run to the line, but I’m driving the car,” Webber said. “I was surprised to end up second, to be honest.”
McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button, their championship hopes all but over already, qualified third and fourth respectively with the top three teams lining up in pairs.
“We weren’t quick enough to be ahead of these guys, but we can definitely challenge them in the race. Our race pace is just as good as theirs,” Hamilton said.
Alonso will line up alongside Brazilian team mate Felipe Massa on the third row.
The Spaniard, a double champion like Vettel, refused to be downcast about his place on the grid or concede that his title hopes were ebbing away after he ceded the lead at the previous race in South Korea.
“I think it’s more challenging for us now but I remain 100 percent confident that we will fight for this championship and we will win it,” he told reporters in the Ferrari hospitality area.
“I still think that we can take some good points tomorrow and hopefully more points than Sebastian and in the next races hopefully be a little bit more competitive,” Alonso said. “The first target is to finish in front of them [Red Bull] tomorrow and I think we have chances to do it.”
Finland’s Kimi Raikkonen, who is third overall but 48 points adrift of Vettel, qualified seventh for Lotus at a circuit the 2007 champion has yet to race on having been absent for the past two years.
Mexican Sergio Perez qualified eighth for Sauber, a boost for Indian-born team principal Monisha Kaltenborn, with Venezuelan Pastor Maldonado ninth for Williams after being fastest in the first phase of qualifying.
Narain Karthikeyan, the only Indian in the race, will start on the back row for strugglers HRT. His time was just 0.001 slower than Spanish teammate Pedro de la Rosa.
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