• Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button secure front row
• World champion Sebastian Vettel qualified sixth
Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button repeated their success in Melbourne by locking out the front row for Sunday’s Malaysian Grand Prix.
Hamilton took his 21st pole of his career – one more than rival Fernando Alonso – with Button second and Michael Schumacher third, his best grid since his return to the sport.
It’s the first time McLaren have taken pole in Malaysia and Hamilton said: “It’s been a good weekend so far. The weather has been tough but we still did some good times.
“The positioning and tyres are going to be everything tomorrow. The track temperatures and humidity will be a big factor in the race, so I don’t know how it’s going to go.”
Button is still looking for his first pole with McLaren but this was another fast drive and he said afterwards: “It was great to hear the team cheering for another 1-2.
“Tomorrow is going to be tough for the cars, the tyres and the drivers.”
Schumacher, more competitive now than in the first two years after his comeback, said: “This was the maximum that was available. We managed to work the car very well over the whole weekend. The focus was to try and find the best compromise for both [the qualifying and the race] and I guessed we have achieved this. Third here is is a very tight business so we can be more than happy and I look forward to tomorrow.”
For the second weekend in a row double world champion Sebastian Vettel was out-qualified by his team-mate Mark Webber, who will be fourth on the grid, ahead of the German who qualified sixth but will start fifth.
The Red Bulls were split by the Lotus of Kimi Raikkonen, who led the field at one point, though he will start tenth after being hit by a five place penalty for his car’s change of gearbox
Red Bull team principle Christian Horner said “It was a good lap by Mark [Webber]. The grid is pretty close. Lewis [Hamilton] did a very, very strong lap. We’ve seen that they’re quick. Hopefully we can have a strong race. We decided to go with a different strategy with Seb [Vettel]. I think the harder tyres are more durable
The problems continued for Felipe Massa, who after finishing faster than Alonso in an earlier run was edged out of Q3 when he finished 12th.
The Williams team, who had caught the eye in Melbourne, were a disappointing 11th and 13th. And it was also a difficult afternoon for the Force India pair of Paul Di Resta and Nico Hulkenberg.
Di Resta said: “I never really got on the limit on sector three. But 14th is not a bad place to start. And our race pace should be better than our qualifying pace, so we can still compete. But it’s pretty warm in the car.”
• German in search of three successive world titles
• Button impressive in practice for Australian Grand Prix
Formula One is alive with dancing new images this season, new drivers, a new venue, and a new television station anxious to beguile and dazzle by painting vivid new colours in front of its audience.
And yet, on the eve of the opening Formula One grand prix of the season, it is a dog-eared old picture that fills the mind: it is of a grinning Sebastian Vettel raising a triumphant forefinger to the world.
Even in Friday’s two practice sessions, dominated respectively by Jenson Button and Michael Schumacher, Vettel came 11th and then 10th but still caught the eye, as will the outline of a shark that is lurking just below the surface. Vettel finds it difficult to travel incognito.
His team principal at Red Bull, Christian Horner, becomes almost breathless with admiration when he talks about him. “All Sebastian has achieved so far in his career is unbelievable. He’s the youngest points scorer; youngest pole position winner; youngest race winner; youngest champion; youngest double champion …
“He has grown in experience, and you forget he is only 24 years of age and done just 81 grands prix. His confidence is obviously very high, and the level he has been operating on has been remarkable.”
Even by the heady standards of a new season’s eve the excitement here is profound. There have never been six world champions on the grid before. New regulations appear to have squeezed up the field. Michael Schumacher has an impressive Mercedes to drive, for a change, Mark Webber and Lewis Hamilton look even leaner and have things to prove, Kimi Raikkonen is back and immediately fast, Button looks serene once more and Fernando Alonso, even when he is glowering behind the leaders, looks an immense force.
And yet it is impossible to look beyond Vettel. It is not only because he has won the past two world championships. It is the manner of the winning – particularly last year, when he swept all before him – that dominates the thought patterns when looking to the months ahead.
He is fast, of course. He has the best car, probably, for it has been designed by the inimitable Adrian Newey, who makes slipstream experts of all other technical directors. But it is Vettel’s intelligence that is his most salient quality, the suggestion he makes that driving at high speed while understanding the data and working the complex machinery around him occupies a comparatively low percentage of his capability.
So, like other great champions before him, such as Jim Clark, Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna, he has the time to look about him, to absorb conditions and the performances of his rivals; he is deeply impressive. His improvement last year, when he eschewed the few impetuous errors he made in 2010, was so striking that one wonders what he has in store for us this time.
Horner says: “He is capable of winning the drivers’ title once again, and I know he’s very motivated to try and ensure he retains the trophy. That doesn’t underestimate the competition and the opponents we’re up against. Plus, it’s easy to forget this is only our eighth car, our eighth season as a team. So we’ve come a long way in a very short space of time. But we’ve got all the right ingredients to try and learn from what we achieved last year and the year before.”
Vettel, then, is the man to beat. And there was more than a suggestion that the Red Bulls were weighed down by heavy fuel levels; the sandbaggers’ last stand, perhaps. The German could become only the third driver to deliver a hat-trick of titles. But it really could be something special this year, and the past two years haven’t been too shabby.
“I’ve never known it as open as this,” Button says. “Never. The last five or six years I’ve raced you would have the McLarens or the Ferraris or, one year, the Brawn, then the Red Bull in 2010 and 2011, but no, I’ve never known it like it is this time.
“I remember my karting days in 1996 and 1997 when we’d have an eight-race European championship and I might win two of them, and the others would be won by other people. There was always a different winner and it was really competitive and it would be good to see that again here.”
Button, more reliable than his McLaren team-mate Hamilton, could be Vettel’s biggest challenger, as he was last year. But Hamilton remains the soap’s most compelling star, the one driver, perhaps, who can wrench the crown from Vettel, provided his car is competitive.
But another bad year for Hamilton and there will be those who will conclude that his decline is permanent. And they will be difficult to argue with. After that the most interesting question marks settle on Raikkonen. The Finn will be fast. When was he ever slow? But can he lead his team as powerfully as Robert Kubica once did?
And what of Schumacher? He is not what he was, we know that. He was unable to arm-wrestle a bad car on to the podium. But can he win another race with a good car? Melbourne is the time, as Vettel famously said, when “everyone pulls their pants down. Then you can see what they have got and you show what you have got.”
• ‘I feel well inside the car,’ says Button
• Red Bull suffer test day to forget
The first day of testing in Formula One, perhaps the phoniest of all phoney wars in sport, still saw McLaren emerge as the clear winners over Red Bull in brilliant Andalusian sunshine.
Jenson Button’s carefully understated satisfaction with his new McLaren disguised a private delight and excitement; the Woking team suspect that they could be on to a winner here or at least a car capable of challenging Red Bull’s swaggering dominance of last year, when Sebastian Vettel won 11 of the 19 races.
Red Bull, meanwhile, had a day of almost comedic mishap. Last season’s double world champions were frustrated for more than three hours after a flight into the town containing the rear-wing assembly had to be diverted to Seville due to early morning fog. They were further delayed when one of their truck drivers was stopped for alleged speeding. Designer Adrian Newey – eight times a constructors’ championship winner with three different teams so do not write them off just yet – shrugged: “The car didn’t catch fire and at least we did manage a few laps.”
This season – which starts in Melbourne on 18 March – will see cars with noses uglier than a warthog’s. So McLaren had already won the beauty contest by avoiding what has come to be known as the “platypus effect”.
Noses have been lowered for safety reasons in a redesign which should also help to restore some of the downforce lost through the banning of the exhaust-blown diffuser. But McLaren’s good looks were more than skin deep. A year ago both Button and Lewis Hamilton were desperately disappointed with the car with which they started the season.
On Tuesday, though, even a cautious Button’s eyes were gleaming. “Yes, it does feel very different to testing last year,” he said. “It’s been a good starting point. What we wheeled out this morning was a great base. I don’t know where it’s going to end up by the time we get to the first race but the important thing is the balance feels all right.
“So it’s a good starting point. I’m looking forward to working with it and I’m happy. There are no niggly areas with the car, it’s still the starting point and we didn’t do any set-up work to improve the balance. And you’re never going to start with a perfect car. It was just putting some miles on it really.
“But I’m very happy in the car. I’m in a good position. I’m really low, which I always like, trying to get as low as possible, the way that the car is. I’m much lower than last year. I can just about see out. I love that position. I feel well inside the car. I feel I’m part of it. Promising times. But we don’t know where we stand and we won’t do until the first race.”
Button, who went past the returning former world champion Kimi Raikkonen in one particularly impressive move going into the second turn, also predicted a more competitive season ahead when he said: “I think you are going to see the cars a lot more bunched up this season, especially at the start of the year and racing gets under way. As we improve throughout the season the field will split a little more but at the start of the year you are going to have a lot of cars that are within a few 10ths.”
Red Bull, however, remain the team to beat. They had the best car in 2010 and last year, with remorseless professionalism, they widened the gap. After his run on Tuesday Mark Webber said: “It was a shame we were a little late out. But we had a good run out.
“I’m not a big fan of the noses this year. Formula One cars should look beautiful and generally they do. I still think ours looks nice. Adrian always builds beautiful cars.”
They say it will be closer this year. But then they said that last year, too. Last year the brilliant Newey was linked with Ferrari and again he was asked about the prancing horse on Tuesday. But the most successful designer in F1 history said: “To be perfectly honest I can’t see myself going anywhere else. I’ve been very centrally involved with the team from very early on and proud we’ve been able to get from where we were, and the ashes of Jaguar, to where we are today.
“That in itself brings a huge amount of satisfaction and kind of a slightly paternal feeling of wanting that to carry on. To now leave for another team would feel a little like walking out on your children in a way.”
A host of familiar faces help Jenson Button celebrate as before he competes in his 200th grand prix in Hungary, at the circuit where he won his first race at in 2006. A number of Button’s fellow drivers, including Fernando Alonso, and his former team bosses popped down to the McLaren compound to celebrate the milestone.
Video Rating: 5 / 5
Onboard start, overtaking cars, team radios finally We are the champions, We are the champions!
Video Rating: 5 / 5
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