Grapevine: Straw poll: Saturday at Fuji

It was all looking so promising for Ferrari with a couple of minutes to go in qualifying. A lightweight Kimi Raikkonen was on top of the timesheet, with his title-chasing teammate Felipe Massa ready to slot in behind him. From there, the pair of prancing horses could surely control the pace.

Then, championship leader Lewis Hamilton carved over seven tenths of a second off the time set on his first lap of Q3 to nick pole, with teammate Heikki Kovalainen and Renault's Fernando Alonso popping up to shove Massa down to fifth. When you're seven points down in the championship, that's not what you want to see.

The consensus was that it was a superb lap by Hamilton - and the consensus was right - although quite how good his effort was turned out to be a matter of some debate between McLaren team boss Ron Dennis and his charge.

Now, it's hard to regard Dennis as an excitable individual, but that's precisely what Hamilton suggested he was for declaring today's effort the best of the 23-year-old's 12 Formula One pole positions.

"I think Ron was just very excited," said Hamilton. "He often comes out with something very positive when he gets very excited. But I generally do feel that I agree with him that it was one of my best laps."

As for Ron, he seemed a little hurt that Hamilton would in any way question his declaration. Even if his driver quickly backtracked and damn near agreed with him.

"He said I was emotional and excited?" asked Dennis when quizzed on it by Motorsport News's Simon Arron. "This is a critical part of the season and this is a circuit on which it is very difficult to overtake - you control this sort of race from the front.

"So perhaps I should have qualified my comments by saying one of the most important pole positions and therefore it is one of his best pole positions.

"I love my motor racing and if I'm prone to moments of excitement, well, so be it. I like going motor racing. Everybody knows that."

No-one was particularly excited about one of the questions fired at Hamilton and teammate Heikki Kovalainen a few minutes earlier. On a weekend where plenty of attention was drawn to the fact that the car is, as everybody knows, not in any way environmentally unfriendly, one journalist offered a cheeky question to the pair.

"This weekend there has been a lot of talk about green cars and ecology. This question is to test you. Do you have an idea how much energy, how many Kilowatt hours of energy there is in one litre of gasoline and how long you could keep a normal energy saving lamp with that?"

Needless to say, they didn't off the top of their heads, but Kovalainen skillfully dodged the question.

"Let's talk about Formula One and qualifying," he said. "Obviously we know the answer, but let's not go into details!"

Elsewhere on the grid, Toyota were pretty happy about Jarno Trulli and Timo Glock locking out the fourth row. Less delighted were rival Japanese manufacturer Honda, who had quite predictably failed to make it out of Q3. All credit to Jenson Button, who tackled the continuing travails of his team with a little humour.

"Look, even if I am 18th on the grid I get people smiling at me," he said after getting a wave and a cheer just before explaining his qualifying tribulations.

Some might say that this was a sign that he wasn't taking the situation seriously. They'd be wrong. Anyone who has had to pedal the dreadful 2007 Honda RA107 and its relatively good but actually still not very quick successor, the RA108, around for two season deserves credit for still having a sense of humour.

But potentially the biggest story of qualifying surrounded Renault's Nelson Piquet. A misheard radio communication led to a rumour that Hamilton had possibly impeded his old GP2 sparring partner during Q2. So could his pole turn into a five-place grid penalty?

A great story in terms of impact, but sadly, it wasn't true. This was good news for Lewis, who wasn't impressed when asked about it in the press conference.

"Are you serious?" he asked. "From qualifying? I don't think I've been overtaken throughout qualifying, so... I don't think so."

Now that would have been a story. But fortunately for Hamilton, it seems that come tomorrow he will once again be grabbing the headlines. For all the right reasons.