Jenson Button showed his mettle yet again with a brilliant last-gasp lap to snatch pole position away from Sebastian Vettel for Sunday’s Spanish Grand Prix.
The championship leader had left his Brawn garage for his crucial final Q3 lap far later than any of his rivals for pole and nearly didn’t even get time to complete his crucial effort after crossing the line just two seconds before the chequered flag fell.But none of this flustered the in-form Briton who, after matching provisional pole man Vettel’s pace through the opening two sectors, nailed an inch-perfect final sector to beat his Red Bull rival to the top spot by just over 0.1s.Button, who leads the title race by 12 points, is now in the perfect place to aim for a fourth win in five races – although the consistently impressive Vettel is set to be a serious threat after the young German maintained his impeccable top-three qualifying record in 2009.
Button’s late heroics denied Brawn team-mate Rubens Barrichello a front-row start, the Brazilian veteran – who topped the low-fuel Q2 - briefly having held provisional pole until Vettel and then Button made bigger gains late on.Barrichello will share the second row with compatriot Felipe Massa after the Brazilian appeared to prove Ferrari’s major F60 upgrade has given the beleaguered reigning champion team a big step forward with its best qualifying result of the year.
However, the Maranello squad was unable to completely banish the memories of its wretched start to the season as Kimi Raikkonen dropped out in Q1.The team inexplicably repeated its mistake with Massa from Sepang and wrongly assumed the Finn had set a fast enough lap time early in the session to progress, only to see other cars set faster times on the soft tyres while its driver sat helplessly in the garage.
Nevertheless its prospects of points are still far higher than old rival McLaren as it slumped to 14th and 18th on the grid with Lewis Hamilton and Heikki Kovalainen respectively.Meanwhile, fifth place went to Vettel’s RBR team-mate Mark Webber, while Bahrain front row-starter Toyota was unable to repeat its feat from two weeks ago and Timo Glock and Jarno Trulli will line up sixth and seventh.
Home hero Fernando Alonso may also be disappointed with his qualifying session after only managing eighth in the updated Renault.Williams’s Nico Rosberg and Robert Kubica in the heavily revised BMW F1.09 rounded up the top 10.
Rosberg’s team-mate Kazuki Nakajima will start 11th for the third time in five races after once again narrowly failing to make the top-10 shootout – the Japanese driver this time missing out by two hundredths of a second.Renault’s under-pressure driver Nelson Piquet Jr was similarly unlucky after his final Q2 lap provisionally put him eighth on the second session times, only to be eventually relegated by several drivers including team-mate Alonso.But 12th place still represents the Brazilian’s best grid position of the season and he can take heart from lapping just under a tenth of a second slower than the sister Renault.
Nick Heidfeld will line up 13th after failing to reach Q3 again following his morning smash, the BMW driver to start alongside reigning world champion Hamilton.
Having admitted ahead of the weekend that the Circuit de Catalunya was likely to expose the MP4-24’s continuing aerodynamic flaws, Hamilton was even more downbeat following Friday practice and doubted he would make Q3.That’s how things played out and the world champion will now have to produce another strong race performance to have any hope of adding to his meagre 2009 points tally.
It will be the same uphill battle for Raikkonen from 16th after the decision to only complete two flying laps backfired spectacularly, with late Q1 improvements from Barrichello, Trulli, Heidfeld and Piquet eventually seeing him tumble to an embarrassing early exit.
The elimination marks the first time the Finn has failed to clear the first qualifying hurdle since the 2007 Monaco GP and just the third time overall since the three-stage format was introduced the year before.
Sandwiching the two superstars on the grid in 15th will be rookie Sebastien Buemi after Toro Rosso’s big aero update didn’t make an impression over a single lap.
However, while Buemi did at least clear Q1, team-mate Sebastien Bourdais again couldn’t match his Swiss team-mate's pace and failed to make the cut with 17th.The Frenchman will share the ninth row with Kovalainen, who fared even worse than Hamilton and only claimed 18th in the struggling McLaren.
Force India’s latest updates, including updated diffuser and driver-adjustable front wing, couldn’t lift the VJM02 any closer to an elusive spot in Q2 and its drivers were again slowest of all.Nevertheless Adrian Sutil [19th] can at least take encouragement from lapping under a tenth slower than Kovalainen and almost half a second quicker than his team-mate Giancarlo Fisichella.
Spanish GP starting grid
1. BUTTON Brawn
2. VETTEL Red Bull
3. BARRICHELLO Brawn
4. MASSA Ferrari
5. WEBBER Red Bull
6. GLOCK Toyota
7. TRULLI Toyota
8. ALONSO Renault
9. ROSBERG Williams
10. KUBICA BMW
11. NAKAJIMA Williams
12. PIQUET Renault
13. HEIDFELD BMW
14. HAMILTON McLaren
15. BUEMI Toro Rosso
16. RAIKKONEN Ferrari
17. BOURDAIS Toro Rosso
18. KOVALAINEN McLaren
19. SUTIL Force India
20. FISICHELLA Force India
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