Vettel takes pole amid damp conditions in Brazil

Sebastian Vettel posted a lap time of 1:27.469 on a wet Interlagos Circuit to take pole position in the final race of the season. Nico Rosberg, who topped the opening two practice sessions of the race weekend on Friday qualified in second, with a time on board that was tenths slower than Vettel.

All sessions this weekend were held in damp conditions and qualifying was no different. However, the conditions got a lot worse and the Race Control decided to delay Q3 by almost 30 minutes.When the final leg of qualifying finally began, Mark Webber led teammate Sebastian Vettel and Toro Rosso’s Jean Eric Vergne out of the pits. Webber set the benchmark which was soon beaten by Sebastian Vettel by over a second. While Webber was able to beat his lap time, he couldn’t match his teammate during his final F1 outing and qualified in fourth.

Fernando Alonso equalled his best grid slot of the season(third) in Brazil with a stunning lap in wet conditions. While Alonso is never considered as a good qualifier, he has a good Saturday record in wet conditions. That record continued this weekend in Sao Paulo.

Hamilton was fifth fastest after complaining yesterday that he doesn’t like the Mercedes W04 in wet conditions. But Rosberg has been quick throughout the four sessions held so far and even the Brit acknowledged that the car has the pace, it’s just up to him to find the pace and get the car up to his liking.

Grosjean was sixth fastest for Lotus ahead of Toro Rosso pairing of Daniel Ricciardo and Jean Eric Vergne. Vergne left it late in Q1 and it looked like he was not going to progress any further as rain started to increase slowly. Luckily rain receded right at the end of the session and Vergne was able to progress to Q2 and later Q3. Nico Hulkenberg completed the top 10.

Heikki Kovalainen was the first drive who failed to make it into Q3. He was joined by the McLaren duo of Sergio Perez and Jenson Button, Force India pairing of Paul di Resta and Adrian Sutil and William’s sole Q2 runner Valtteri Bottas. Both the McLaren drivers had saved their tyres in practice earlier this morning, hoping to use them aggressively in afternoon’s qualifying, but in the end, it didn’t quite work out for the Woking squad. To make matters worse, Sergio Perez had a massive crash in his final qualifying for McLaren, leaving the mechanics with a lot of work to do on his MP4-28.

Maldonado and Gutierrez were the two drivers, outside of the bottom two teams who got eliminated in Q1.