Red Bulls to start from front row

Sebastian Vettel will start from the front at the Indian GP after scoring his 13th pole position of the season and a record breaking 16th for his team at the Buddh International Circuit.

The champion will be joined on an all-Red Bull front row by Mark Webber, who qualified third, but who will start second courtesy of the three-place grid penalty imposed on this afternoon’s second fastest man Lewis Hamilton.

“All in all I am very happy,” said Vettel in the official FIA post-qualifying press conference. “A great session for us and the car was fantastic. In the end the lap was fine but it wasn’t 100 per cent, a little bit here and there, but I think you always come out of the car thinking that maybe here and there you could have gained a bit of time – but overall I’m very happy with the result. It is good to start the race from the front tomorrow and I think it is going to be interesting.”

On Friday Webber disclosed that he was struggling with the set-up of his car, but professed himself pleased with the way it handled during qualifying. “I feel much happier with the car now and we have certainly done what we can to help it for the race, so [I’m] looking forward to it.

“We are at a point in the season when you can also try and test a few things [for 2012] so we started off very well in P1 and Seb had a pretty smooth P2. Mine was less smooth just for different reasons because we always try to improve the car and also try to gain some experience for future reference. In the end we basically went back to a lot of the stuff.”

While Vettel has only started on the even, usually dirtier, side of the track three times this year, it has been a recurrent problem for Webber, though the Australian doesn’t believe this new circuit has had time to develop a significantly cleaner side of the grid. “It doesn’t look like, but I guess we’ll find out tomorrow,” he said. Both drivers, however, gave voice to the opinion that, while the profile of the circuit provides for multiple lines into several corners, the dust that is a feature here is making it a risk to go off what line has developed.

“It is very, very smooth and it is pretty quick and exciting [but] I think the debris off-line will get worse during the race,” added Webber. “We all want to race: the people who are in the front of the field and the people who get lapped, we all want to stay on the racing line and drive our own race so it could be tricky,” added Vettel. “Off-line it is quite dusty and depending on where you have to go off-line to maybe lap another car to make a pass could be critical for the next couple of corners. It is not only you lose in that corner where you went off-line but also afterwards just to get the tyres back to the grip level you had before. In this regard it could be interesting, especially at the beginning of the race it will be quite slippery.”

F1 Media