Aaron Favila/Associated Press Sebastian Vettel, the Red Bull driver and reigning world champion, scored the pole position for the Malaysian Grand Prix outside Kuala Lumpur.
As Sebastian Vettel said himself, he managed to find the speed he needed at just the right moment: As the last contender across the line in his last lap in qualifying for the Malaysian Grand Prix. That’s when the Red Bull driver snapped the pole position out of the grasp of Lewis Hamilton, of McLaren Mercedes.
“It was quite a challenging weekend until qualifying,” Vettel said. “I was happy with the car but never got into a sort of rhythm. We knew we had it in the car, the main thing was to keep believing in it.”
We see that kind of performance again and again from the greatest champions, who just manage to get all the pieces together at just the right time. As it turned out, there were four drivers still quite likely to score pole in the final lap, with Mark Webber, Vettel’s teammate, finishing third and Jenson Button finishing fourth fastest.
But as far as champions go, the story is not so happy with Michael Schumacher, who for the second race of the season managed to qualify only 11th, and failed to make it into the third qualifying session. The Mercedes driver had started the weekend well, with top times in Friday’s practice sessions. But as has frequently happened since his return from retirement last year, it all falls apart in qualifying. Pretty frightening for the man who holds the Formula One record for pole positions, with 68.
On the other hand, the two Hispania cars qualified for the race this time after failing to do so in the first race, two weeks ago in Australia.
But Vettel also summed up the general situation among the leading teams: “The gap is a lot smaller than in Australia, it just shows how quickly things can change,” he said about the distance to McLaren, at just a tenth of a second.
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