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Jenson Button claimed his third pole position of the year in Saturday’s qualifying for the Spanish Grand Prix.

Starting his final flying lap just seconds before the end of the session, Button set a lap time of 1:20.527, a tenth of a second faster than second place man Sebastian Vettel.

Button’s team mate, Rubens Barrichello, will start from third on the grid alongside Felipe Massa which should warm some cockles back at Maranello.

Kimi Raikkonen was driving the new ‘Superleggera’ version of the F60, which gave him 10kg more ballast weight to play with but while both the Red Cars were quick in practice an error in strategy saw Raikkonen being dropped in the first qualifying session.

In a repeat of Malaysia, Ferrari thought Kimi’s time would be enough to get him through to the second qualifying session and so decided not to send him out again.  As it turned out he was 2 tenths slower than Sebastien Buemi and will start way back on the eighth row of the grid.

Still, it does look like Ferrari have made significant improvement since Bahrain and Raikkonnen is confident the team can improve further:

We are still a bit behind, I would say, but it’s much stronger than it was before.  It’s only the first step, so we can get some more for the next races. After that, for sure we can catch them up even if it takes a little while.

I don’t know if we can tomorrow or not, but in the later races we can definitely fight for wins, podiums and good positions.

As expected, the McLarens of Lewis Hamilton and Heikki Kovalainen performed poorly and only managed 14th and 18th, respectively.

2009 Spanish Grand Prix Qualifying Results

Image: Brawn GP

Jenson Button claimed his third victory of the season in Sunday’s Bahrain Grand Prix and increased his lead in the World Drivers’ Championship to 12 points.

Toyota had qualified on the front row of the grid and Jarno Trulli was hoping to score the first win for the Japanese team but a poor start and bad tyre choices saw him finish third behind Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel.  Whereas Button and Vettel went for a super soft – super soft – medium strategy, Trulli spent a long middle stint on the slower medium tyres.

After the race, Trulli seemed somewhat deflated and it wasn’t just the 50 degree temperature:

I am a little bit disappointed because I was waiting for the first win for Toyota.

During the second stint we used a very long stint on the hard tyres, so I was trying to fight and it was really hard fighting with a lot of cars. I was not extremely quick.

Lewis Hamilton had a great start and was “delighted” with his fourth place finish – his best of the season.

Kimi Raikkonen, under the stern gaze of Ferrari President Luca di Montezemolo, managed a measly three points to save the Scuderia the dishonour of their worst start to an F1 season ever but poor Felipe Massa finished in 14th, a lap down and battling with the Force India of Fisichella.

Although he won by 7 seconds, Button said it was a tough race:

Our car is competitive but it’s still not easy to drive and that’s something that we need to work on because I had a lot of moments during the race where I was wide, locked up rears or fronts.

Jenson is clearly worried that the early advantage Brawn GP has had is starting to be clawed back by teams like McLaren.  The Spanish Grand Prix in two weeks’ time will see most teams bring updated cars including new double-diffusers for Ferrari and BMW but with almost twice as many points as their nearest rival Brawn GP don’t have too much to worry about yet.

2009 Bahrain Grand Prix Race Results

The FIA now publish the declared weights of the cars at the start of the Grand Prix.  Those cars that made it through to the third qualifying session are weighed directly after qualifying while others have their weights declared by the team shortly after the session.

The top ten cars must use the fuel they qualified with while the rest of the field may refuel before the race.

As every Formula One car weighs the same without fuel (605kg), knowing the weights of the cars allows us to predict when drivers will have to stop and also whether the time set in qualifying is indicative of race pace.

Below is a graph showing the actual top ten qualifying times as well as their times adjusted for the weight of fuel they are carrying.  The graph assumes a standard cost of 0.3 seconds per 10kg of fuel.

The graph shows just how fast the Toyotas are.  Even allowing for the fact that they are carrying less fuel than the Brawn GP cars, Jarno Trulli’s fuel-adjusted time was about half a second faster than Jenson Button.  Will Toyota score their first Formula One victory on Sunday?

All the winter testing at the Sakhir circuit seemed to pay off for Toyota on Saturday as Jarno Trulli and Timo Glock locked out the front row of the grid for Sunday’s Bahrain Grand Prix.

This was the first pole position for the Japanese team since Ralf Schumacher at the 2005 Japanese Grand Prix and the first time Toyota have started from first and second position on the grid.

Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel will start from third next to the Brawn GP of Jenson Button.

Fresh from his second place finish in last week’s Chinese Grand Prix, Vettel’s team mate Mark Webber returned to his usual unlucky form. He was badly blocked by a swerving Adrian Sutil in the final corner of the first session and ended up in 19th place.

When asked if he would be protesting, Webber didn’t seem to think there was much point:

It doesn’t make any difference.  My race is screwed.

Nelson Piquet Jr has been under a lot of pressure to perform and with the help of an interim diffuser he managed to lift himself out of the first qualifying session but could manage no better than 15th.

2009 Bahrain Grand Prix Qualifying Results

Update: Sutil penalised three places for blocking Webber in qualifying.

When will Nico Rosberg translate his practice performance into race pace?  The Williams driver has been consistently at the top of the time sheets in practice this year but so far has failed to deliver on race day.

While Lewis Hamilton went quickest in the first practice session for Sunday’s Bahrain Grand Prix, Nico Rosberg set the fastest time in the second session.

Fernando Alonso had been running high fuel loads and concentrating on race setup and so had been at the bottom of the order but he put in a flying lap at the end to go second fastest as Pat Symonds, Renault’s Executive Director of Engineering, explains:

The Bahrain circuit is our first hard braking circuit of the year and ranks among the hardest for the total braking system. In view of this, we spent a lot more time today on heavier than normal fuel loads, concentrating on our set-up for Sunday.

Here are the times from the first two practice sessions:
First Practice

Second Practice

Image: LAT