F1: Vettel claims his 33rd pole in Valencia

Valencia, June 23, 2012 – Red Bull driver Sebastian Vettel is now the third most successful qualifier in Formula One history, joining Jim Clark and Alain Prost on 33 pole positions, who set a time of 1m38.086s in Valencia. Only Michael Schumacher and Ayrton Senna have claimed more pole positions in Formula One’s record books, while it was Vettel’s third consecutive pole on the Spanish street circuit.

Only the Toro Rosso of Jean-Eric Vergne, the two HRTs and the solitary Marussia of Charles Pic started Q1 on the soft tyres, which was held in ambient temperatures of 25 degrees centigrade and 43 degrees of track temperature. Williams driver Pastor Maldonado went fastest on the soft tyre, while Mercedes driver Nico Rosberg was the fastest driver to get through on the medium, with third-quickest time.

Everyone who went through to Q2 started on the soft tyre, apart from the two Ferrari drivers who started the session with a run on mediums before switching over to the softer compound. Caterham’s Heikki Kovalainen, who also used the soft tyre at the end of Q1, got through to Q2 for just the second time this year and will start from 16th on the grid: the team’s highest-ever placing. The first seven who got through to Q3 – led by Lotus driver Romain Grosjean – were covered by just a tenth of a second, making it one of the closest qualifying sessions that has ever taken place.

The final top 10 in Q3 all used the soft tyre to set their best times with Grosjean and then Maldonado going fastest, before Vettel seized the initiative with a time that was more than three-tenths of a second quicker than anybody else. In the closing seconds, McLaren driver Lewis Hamilton claimed second place on the grid ahead of Maldonado.

In the hour-long free practice session this morning, McLaren’s Jenson Button went fastest with a time of 1m38.562s on the soft tyre as the teams carried out their final qualifying simulations. Beforehand, most drivers also tried the medium tyres – with Vettel proving to be quickest on the harder compound.

With up to half a second per lap between the two tyres, strategy will be extremely important for the race. A two-stop strategy will be the most likely option for the frontrunners, with the soft tyres expected to perform at their best for 15-18 laps and the medium tyres having a useful life of approximately 20-22 laps.

Driver Quotes- Valencia

Sebastien Vettel-Red Bull –  “I think it was a great recovery from Q1 and Q2 today, as I didn’t feel entirely happy in those. It had been a good weekend leading up to qualifying, but conditions changed before Q1. However in the end we pulled it altogether. Everyone has worked very hard with preparing new parts for the car, which seem to be a step forward. Bringing new parts is not always straightforward, as we’ve seen. Often people try things on Friday, but then go back to their previous set up for the weekend. However this weekend we seem to have made a step forward, although we will give them a proper try tomorrow. We have been good here in previous years, so hopefully we can keep it up for tomorrow. The guys deserve that, they have worked hard all weekend.”

Lewis Hamilton -McLaren- “I’m extremely happy to be starting on the front row. To see other teams make big improvements to their cars this weekend, and yet still be starting from P2, is a surprise that I’ll happily take. We’d been struggling a little with set-up and front [wheel] locking from the start of practice yesterday, so I went into qualifying really just focusing on getting a decent result and starting as high up the order as possible. So, as I say, managing to bag P2 is very welcome. Nevertheless, it’s going to be hard to look after the tyres in the hot conditions we’re expecting for the race, so we’ll be doing some work tonight to analyse and understand just what I did in the last race to make sure my tyres last as long as possible tomorrow. Overtaking will be very difficult, as always here, but degradation will be a bigger issue for everyone, I think. I’ll just be looking to score as many points as I can. If I can finish where I’ve qualified – second – that would consolidate my world title bid. Anything more than that – a win in other words – would, of course, be a bonus.”

Pastor Maldonado-Williams– “We’ve been working so hard to understand the car but there is still more performance to find on the soft tyre. The team did a great job today though and Williams is getting stronger and stronger. It’s not only a good result for the team, but also for my country and there are so many Venezuelan fans here supporting me which is great to see. Strategy will be important tomorrow as it’s very hot, but it will make it difficult for everyone. I’m looking forward to pushing for a podium finish tomorrow.”

Bruno Senna-Williams – “I’m not too happy with our qualifying result today as I wasn’t able to put all my best sectors together which cost me a lot of positions. However, the car feels good for tomorrow so hopefully we can have a stronger race. It’s going to be very tough with the high temperatures but we will be pushing hard to come away with some points.”

Jenson Button-McLaren- “The team worked really hard overnight to improve the issues we’d had with front [wheel] locking during Friday practice – and, this morning, I felt we’d improved the car a lot, which was really encouraging. Somehow, however, my car felt very different on fresh rubber at the end of Q3 than it had felt all day up to then. On my final run in Q3, the balance felt very different – I had too much understeer – and, every time I touched the brakes, I locked the fronts. I don’t know whether the circuit had changed, but I just couldn’t stop locking my fronts. So it’s disappointing to be starting ninth, especially as previous races have demonstrated that it’s difficult to overtake around here. The key, then, will be to make the right calls on strategy.”

Kamui Kobayashi, Sauber “I’m happy with the car and with the result – the team did a very good job. The lap times are so close. If you make the smallest mistake anywhere you end up nowhere. My lap was okay and I think perhaps the absolute maximum I could have squeezed out was another tenth, but no more. It definitely was worth giving everything in Q3 as we managed to put three cars behind us. We have tried to adapt to the high temperatures here and did a good job on that. One of our targets was to improve in qualifying and we have achieved that today. Now we have to keep the momentum and the performance for the race and I’m pretty confident we can do that.”

Nico Rosberg-Mercedes-  “We had a lot of potential going into qualifying, but unfortunately I can’t be happy with the outcome today. We were quick throughout but when I was just about to start my final lap, Lewis was slowing down in the last corner. I had to start my quick lap behind him which made it impossible to improve my time. We know it’s tricky in the last sector here and there is an agreement in place to stop things like this happening so it’s frustrating. It will be an interesting race tomorrow from a strategy perspective, and I hope there will be the opportunity to make up some places.”

Michael Schumacher–Mercedes- “What a close qualifying session. Of course, I’m not particularly happy about not making it through Q2 but that was clearly down to me – I didn’t get my lap together. On my first run, I was too aggressive in turn 12 on my first timed lap, then had to abort the second lap and pit because the tyres were no longer in good enough condition to improve. After that, I was a bit too conservative on the second run and that cost us, because the times were so close today. On the other hand, my starting position opens up strategic possibilities for tomorrow. I have new sets of tyres available which is the positive aspect of my situation. We will certainly make the most of them.

Heikki Kovalainen- Caterham –  “Today’s performance was the result of a great effort by the whole team. This morning we weren’t sure if we could do it or not but both runs in Q1 were really good. As the temperatures went up and the track kept evolving my car just felt better and better and I really got the most out of it on that final lap on the softs. In Q2 we opted to wait until the end of the session and see if we could improve on the Q1 time and while that wasn’t quite possible we achieved the target of beating both Toro Rosso cars and that obviously is a great feeling. I think tomorrow could now be really interesting for us – it looks like we have the chance to race them and that’s a significant step forward for our team. We’ve been getting closer to them in the last couple of races, but this track, the conditions here and the upgrades we’ve brought give us the chance to make good on our goal of joining the midfield, so now we need to translate today’s result into more good news tomorrow and keep moving forwards.”

Vitaly Petrov-Caterham  “This has been a good day for the team with the upgrades we’ve brought here helping us take another step forwards. For me I had a good first run on the medium tyres and then was going well on the softs but made a small mistake which cost me a couple of tenths and around this track you only need to lose a small amount of time to drop a few places back. Now it’s time to focus on the race and anything could happen here. I think the key to a good race will be managing tyre degradation and so far this weekend we’ve been reasonably pleased with how our car’s been performing here on the long runs. We obviously won’t know until tomorrow how our nearest competitors will be able to look after their tyres, so we’ll just make sure we put in as good a performance as we can, get the car home and see where we end up.”

Mark Webber –“I had no DRS, which costs about 1.3 second per lap and made it difficult. The car’s put up a big fight today, we only managed to do four laps and three of those were in qualifying. In the first qualifying session we did one lap on the harder tyre and then went out on the soft tyre to try and get through as it was so tight. The lap time actually wasn’t too bad considering we didn’t have DRS, but it doesn’t do anything to help the situation. We have a lot to do tomorrow. We were hoping to fix the DRS for Q2 but we didn’t make the cut; we should be able to fix it for tomorrow.”