Bottas grabs first pole of the season

The Williams Formula 1 test driver controlled the session from the beginning, and was never headed at the top of the times. But there was a frantic battle for the places behind him, with Sims grabbing second place as the last driver to complete a lap in the session.

That effort from the Briton robbed Antonio Felix da Costa of a maiden front row start for a Saturday race this year. The Portuguese driver has won the past three reversed grid Sunday races, but he had been targeting improved performances in qualifying.

Da Costa will be joined on the second row by Daniel Juncadella, while Roberto Merhi got himself into the top five with a lap in the final minute of qualifying.

That left Laurens Vanthoor as the lead driver for 2010 champion team Signature. The French squad endured its first difficult qualifying session of the year, with Vanthoor ending up 0.9 seconds adrift of the pace.

Remarkably, his championship leading team-mates Edoardo Mortara and Marco Wittmann will share the fifth row of the grid.

Wittmann, who needs to outscore Mortara by two points in the race to prevent the title from being decided tomorrow, never featured towards the sharp end. Mortara briefly got as high as third with four minutes to go, before he was gradually bumped back to ninth.

Motopark Academy's two new additions to the 2010 grid could not trouble the top end of the times. GP3 racer and F3 veteran Renger van der Zande could only manage 12th, while his fellow GP3 racer Tobias Hegewald will line up at the back in 14th.

Pos  Driver                  Team       Car  Time       Gap
 1.  Valtteri Bottas         ART        D/M  1m20.412s
 2.  Alexander Sims          ART        D/M  1m21.016s  + 0.604s
 3.  Antonio Felix da Costa  Motopark   D/V  1m21.087s  + 0.675s
 4.  Daniel Juncadella       Prema      D/M  1m21.166s  + 0.754s
 5.  Roberto Merhi           Mucke      D/M  1m21.193s  + 0.781s
 6.  Laurens Vanthoor        Signature  D/V  1m21.355s  + 0.943s
 7.  Jim Pla                 ART        D/M  1m21.387s  + 0.975s
 8.  Carlos Munoz            Mucke      D/M  1m21.576s  + 1.164s
 9.  Edoardo Mortara         Signature  D/V  1m21.708s  + 1.296s
10.  Marco Wittmann          Signature  D/V  1m21.770s  + 1.358s
11.  Nicolas Marroc          Prema      D/M  1m21.807s  + 1.395s
12.  Renger van der Zande    Motopark   D/V  1m21.851s  + 1.439s
13.  Matias Laine            Motopark   D/V  1m21.935s  + 1.523s
14.  Tobias Hegewald         Motopark   D/V  1m22.605s  + 2.193s