Greater Noida: Sebastian Vettel pipped Nico Rosberg to grab the pole position for Sunday's Indian Grand Prix here at Buddh International Circuit on Saturday.
There was no stopping Vettel as he came out with a flying lap of 1:24.119 to grab his third straight pole in India, seventh of the season and 43rd of his career. Vettel is the only driver to win the Indian GP and is now set for a hat-trick of victories as he also improved on his fastest lap in India. His previous best time was 1:24.178 in 2011.
Rosberg was followed by his teammate Lewis Hamilton (1:24.941) as Mercedes prevented a Red Bull lock out by pushing Mark Webber (1:25.047) to fourth. Felipe Massa outpaced his Ferrari teammate for the fourth time in the last five races to be fifth and next to him would be Kimi Raikkonen in his Lotus.
Vettel said that the car felt good all weekend and it just got better as the track improved. “The car was amazing; it’s a great circuit, I really like the flow of it, especially around the middle sector with the high speed corners. If the car behaves the way you want it to through that section then you’re always then going to enjoy it, as we did today. It’s a great result for the team; Mark is on a different strategy, so we’ll see what the race brings tomorrow. We have been getting a lot of questions about the Championship this weekend, but we’ll keep doing what we’ve done in the past, just focusing on every single step – we won’t change that for tomorrow, or the next couple of races. We’ve worked hard to get here and tomorrow is a long race. With the strategy, I think it’s always tricky do the right thing, but we have a good package so we should be in good shape,” he added.
Meanwhile his Red Bull team-mate Mark Webber said, “We thought it was worth trying something a little bit different with the strategy today, so that’s why we ran the primes in Q3. We thought we would probably be a bit further back than the second row to be honest, so it turned out to be a good session for us. It’s not easy to manage the primes when you just get a look at them in Q3, but I think we did a good job and we didn’t leave too much out there. We’re in a good position to capitalise on a different approach tomorrow. The option tyre (used by the first three cars) shouldn’t last too long and we’ll be on a different strategy. That said, I’ll still have to use the softer tyre in the race at some point, so let’s see.”
