Howdy Partner! Vettel Grabs Pole Positon in the USA

Here’s the USA Grand Prix qualifying in brief:

Q1:  Caterham and Marussia are joined by Pastor Maldonado and Adrian Sutil.  Sutil had a car issue and had to pull out, Maldonado just didn’t have the pace and seemed to blame the team for giving him an inferior car.  His team mate was fastest in Q1.

Q2: Button complained about understeer and oversteer, failed to make it through to Q1 whereas his sacked team mate, Perez sailed through.  The Toro Rosso duo failed to make it through, as did Massa who couldn’t put in a magic lap a la Alonso who nailed it and go through to Q3 in a under-performing Ferrari.

Rosberg also had a rubbish session and couldn’t get it together, bailing out in Q2 – not helped by the unexpected but brilliant performance of Valtteri Bottas in his Williams who maintained his Q1 pace into Q2.  Lotus’ last minute Finnish driver swap out worked well – Heikki Kovalainen joined Grosjean, heading through to Q3.

Q3: The Sebastian Vettel demonstration session was temporarily interrupted by Mark Webber who looked to have one over his four-times-a-champion team mate.  But no, Vettel came back with a last minute incredible lap to make it another pole of his career.

The Red Bull duo were nearly a whole second faster than everyone else, with Romain Grosjean claiming P3, ahead of Hulkenberg, Hamilton and Alonso.  Heikki Kovalainen’s return has been impressive, he nailed 8th position in the end, just ahead of Bottas in 9th.

The starting grid for tomorrow is below – Jenson Button has a 3 place penalty and Pic a 5 place penalty.  There may be other changes once the stewards have met…