My turn, Seb

Australian Mark Webber grabbed his first pole position of the season, the seventh of his career, at the Catalunya circuit near Barcelona on Saturday. The Red Bull veteran is therefore the first driver to outpace his teammate, world champion Sebastian Vettel, in qualifying this season.

"I put together a very nice lap and had a good fight with Seb, I'm looking forward to the race tomorrow," Webber told reporters after breaking his teammate's five-race pole streak.

And it's fair to say that only Mark Webber, driving the same Red Bull car as Vettel, had any realistic chance of doing so. Throughout practice, Red Bulls had topped the timesheets, seemingly fighting only with each other. The two drivers were separated by just two tenths of a second in qualifying, but third-placed driver Lewis Hamilton was almost a full second slower than Webber in his McLaren.

"We had some problems and Mark did a good job. It was between us, he did a better job today. Tomorrow is a long race," Vettel said after the session. The young German must now try to break tradition at the undulating, narrow Catalunya circuit; overtaking tends to be tricky there, and so the pole-sitter has won the last 10 Spanish Grands Prix.

Ferrari's Fernando Alonso will start alongside Lewis Hamilton on the second row of the grid, after performing beyond the team's expectations in qualifying. Ferrari had removed a new part, deemed illegal by the stewards, on Saturday morning, and Alonso's Italian race engineer Andrea Stella radioed in at the end of the session to say "I have the impression that was a very good lap." The Spanish double world champion, when told he had secured fourth, cheered as if he'd just won a race.

Mercedes back on course

The German Mercedes GP duo Nico Rosberg and Michael Schumacher both reached the final pole-position shootout among the ten quickest cars. Rosberg set the seventh-fastest time, while Schumacher failed to complete a flying lap within the allotted time limit, after aborting his only attempt. Mercedes still seem well adrift of the race-winning pace they had hoped for pre-season, but the team is moving steadily up the field after a disastrous start to the year.

Adrian Sutil, driving a Mercedes-powered Force India, failed to reach the final ten-car shootout in qualifying, and will have to be satisfied with 17th on the grid. Sutil complained after the session that planned improvements to the car introduced in Spain had not worked as well as the team expected and hoped.

Fireworks at the back

Nick Heidfeld will start at the back of the grid in Barcelona on Sunday, having never taken to the track in Qualifying. Early in the final practice session on Saturday morning, Heidfeld's Lotus Renault car spectacularly burst into flames, and the mechanics were unable to repair the damage to the engine, exhaust, gearbox and bodywork.

"There just wasn't enough time, it's a short break between the final practice and qualifying, and the car was just too badly damaged by the fire," Heidfeld said on German television after the disappointment.

20th-placed Timo Glock endured another difficult qualifying session in his Virgin car, made all the worse as he watched Heikki Kovalainen - driving for Team Lotus, another of the three 'new' teams that debuted in F1 in 2010 - secure a place in the second phase of qualifying. That marks a major milestone for F1's new backmarkers, one Glock would probably have liked to reach first.

Author: Mark Hallam
Editor: Andreas Illmer