Jenson Button clinched his second successive Pole position of the season with a good drive in the Saturday Qualifying session for the ‘09 Malaysian Grand Prix at Sepang. Brawn GP have done it again, put both their cars in the top five although Rubens Barrichello will drop from 4th to 9th due to a gearbox change. Lining up alongside Button will be the Toyota of Jarno Trulli who came within nine hundredths of a second of the time posted by Button. Sebastien Vettel qualified third but he will move down to 13th due to the penalty for his accident at the Australian Grand Prix. After the re-adjustments, the grid lines up thus behind Button & Trulli: Timo Glock in 3rd, Nico Rosberg in 4th, Mark Webber in 5th, Robert Kubica in 6th, Kimi Raikkonen in 7th, Fernando Alonso in 8th with Barrichello and Nick Heidfeld rounding off the top ten.
Apart from Brawn’s pace and consistency, the two biggest talking points were McLaren and Lewis Hamilton’s indiscretions at the Australian Grand Prix and Ferrari and Felipe Massa having an abysmal Qualifying session with Massa failing to make it through the Q1 session itself! The team made a ‘blunder’ with the soft compound tyres and it was too late to make any changes as the clock ticked down on Q1. The other casualties in the first session were Sebastien Buemi, Adrian Sutil, Giancarlo Fisichella and Nelson Piquet. Q2 weeded out both the McLarens of Lewis Hamilton and Heikki Kovalainen – who’ll start 12th and 14th respectively – alongwith Kazuki Nakajima and Sebastien Bourdais. Sebastien Vettel will join them in the middle of the pack.
The race start will most probably be a cracker, what with the fastest car on the track – Brawn – alongside the KERS-enabled Toyota! A first-corner scrap is not ruled out and I kinda think the two BMW’s and the lone Ferrari will do some ‘bumping-up-the-track’ at the start. Bring it on…
Qualifying Report | Pic Courtesy Crash.net