World champion Sebastian Vettel set a blistering qualifying lap-time yesterday to seize pole position for Red Bull in today’s season-opening Australian Formula One Grand Prix in Melbourne.
The 23-year-old German whizz, who became the youngest world champion last season, blew away his rivals and left teammate Mark Webber shaking his head with a best lap time of one minute and 23.529 seconds. Vettel’s time was half a second faster than his pole-winning time in last year’s Australian race and almost 0.8 seconds quicker than his nearest challenger Lewis Hamilton.
Vettel also revealed that he did not use the extra power boost of KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System) during qualifying.
“The key for me is to finish the race, see the chequered flag,” said Vettel, who failed to finish last year’s Australian GP despite posting the fastest qualifying time. “I feel confident that we’ve had a very good preparation during the winter, we didn’t suffer any reliability issues so the car was reliable from the outset.”
It was Vettel’s 16th career pole and comes after Red Bull posted 15 poles from 19 races in last year’s season.
Hamilton, the 2008 world champion, was astonished by the substantial eight-tenths of a second gap to Vettel, but was pleased with the strong improvement of his McLaren car from winter testing.
“The gap is not normal,” Hamilton said of the massive leeway in pace McLaren have to make up on Vettel’s Red Bull. “At least we’re in the fight and from there we can score good points and continue to work on our reliability and work on closing the gap. Of course it’s going to be very tough, it’s a big gap to fill.
“I’m absolutely thrilled to be on the front row of the grid, the guys back at the factory have done an unbelievable job and we’ve taken a massive step this weekend with the cars.”
Webber, yearning to win his home GP at his 10th attempt, was disappointed to have lost a front row spot on the grid to Hamilton’s late run.
Published in The Express Tribune, March 27th, 2011.
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