Lewis: King of the Mountain

The McLaren ace timed his mastery of the Fuji conditions perfectly to take pole and strike a psychological blow over rival Alonso. By MARK HUGHES

"I wasn't thinking about the championship when I was doing that lap," said Lewis Hamilton. "I was thinking about pole." He got it too - and in so doing gave those title chances he wasn't thinking about a big boost.

It would have been so easy in the circumstances - no morning practice and a wet, foggy track that brought back memories of the same place 31 years ago - to have made a critical slip, either out on the constantly changing track, or in the choice of tyres.

First qualifying began with everyone on the extreme wets, but with five minutes to go Takuma Sato recorded a very respectable lap on normal wets (aka inters), this triggering a rush pitwards for everyone.

It was therefore an extremely crowded track when the critical times were being set and, for a brief period, Hamilton looked in danger of getting caught up in traffic and not making it out of Q1 - a disaster for his title aspirations.

There was pressure on him therefore as he began his flyer, especially with team-mate Fernando Alonso going consistently fast. But he was up to the job and ended up fourth, just 0.1sec behind. Into the second session, he was quickest by 0.1sec - from Alonso.

By now the track seemed to be in a state of greasy equilibrium. The best of it seemed to be in the fuel- burning stage of Q3 - and Alonso was making full use of it, not appearing to be treating it as fuel- burn, but as pukka qualifying.

Hamilton, by contrast, seemed to be experimenting with wet lines, trying to find where the best grip was. The two had decided on different tyre strategies too, with Fernando going for just one new set, reckoning on there being more to be found by keying himself into the conditions than there was from a second attempt on fresh rubber.

It wasn't as if the track was going to be rubbering-in, after all. Besides, if it suddenly rained harder, Alonso's hard fuel-burn pace would have left him sitting pretty. It was a sound strategy. Hamilton stuck with the conventional two new-tyre runs - and for most of the session it looked like it wasn't going to work.

On his first run he failed to beat Alonso's fuel-burn time. Alonso then made his single stop and duly beat his own provisional pole. This was not looking good for Hamilton and time was running short as he dived into the pits for his last set of inters. Critically, this time a lightly scrubbed set were fitted.

Jenson Button had used a worn set to go an excellent sixth fastest in Q2, recalling what he'd learned during his victorious drive in last year's Hungarian Grand Prix - that the lower tread blocks of a worn set seemed to allow them to run cooler than a fresh set, and therefore faster in conditions where they are easy to overheat.

He'd used another set for a lap that would stand as seventh fastest in Q3, transcending the Honda by an outrageous degree on a day when Rubens Barrichello - a very good wet-weather driver himself - could not get the dog of a car out of Q1. Now, Lewis was gambling his final throw of the dice on a scrubbed set.

Time for just one flying lap. Alonso's new-tyre lap stood as provisional pole at 1m 25.438s. Hamilton was faster than his team- mate in the first sector, slower in the second. It hung on the tight uphill twists of the final sector.

Exiting Panasonic, the final uphill sweep onto the long, long pit straight, he could see a car in the gloom ahead of him. Excellent, he thought, he could use it to get a tow up to the line. He homed in on it until realising at the last moment that it was going very slowly.

He darted to the left of what turned out to be Sebastian Vettel's Toro Rosso in fuel-saving mode with a terrifying speed difference, and crossed the line to trip the beams at 1m 25.368s. A fabulous lap under huge pressure. Even before the team had confirmed his pole over the radio, he already knew, was already dancing with his legs, having seen the big screen beside the paddock club area.

Alonso did a good job to hide what must have been a serious blow, given the stakes and the circumstances of the championship challenge - and the fact that his tyre strategy had looked for most of the session to be the right one.

The Ferraris filled the second row, Kimi Raikkonen ahead of Felipe Massa. The F2007 was just a couple of tenths adrift of the McLaren in the wet, but consistently so. Its stiffer structure and limited suspension travel made it a less suitable car for such conditions, though in the dry it looked at least a match.

Raikkonen felt he could maybe have taken a place off Alonso had he not been suffering an electronic glitch in the gearbox. Massa felt his car develop more oversteer as the final session unfolded, even more so when he fitted his new tyres. It left him mystified and trailing his team- mate by a few tenths.

Nick Heidfeld's fifth place for BMW could have been closer had his single set of new inters not overheated - because his tyre pressures had been set too low. His time actually came from his best fuel-burn lap. Running much heavier, Robert Kubica was back in 10th, but the lowly position was about more than fuel load. His chosen pressures proved too high. The rubber didn't heat up quickly enough and as such he required more laps than were available to bring them up to temperature.

The Williams mechanics had to change Nico Rosberg's Toyota engine on Saturday, giving him a 10-place grid penalty. Which was a pity, as he went on to qualify sixth fastest, with just one new-tyre run. Team-mate Alex Wurz failed to get out of Q1 after trailing Rosberg by 0.9sec, compromised by being selected for a random weight check at an awkward time.

Behind Button was the Red Bull of Mark Webber, eighth fastest a great effort considering a fuel load good for 31 laps. This had been done in error: too much had been delivered. Fuel-corrected, he was fifth fastest just 0.9sec off Hamilton. David Coulthard in the sister car didn't get out of Q2, partly because of a communications mix- up over the front wing level he wanted for his second new-tyre run. He was back in 13th, his best Q2 lap 0.7sec off Webber's.

Sebastian Vettel was one of ' the stars of qualifying, using the conditions and a set-up heavily favoured for the wet to get a Toro Rosso through to Q3 for the first time in the team's history. Seventh quickest in Q1 (despite a spin out of turn three), 10th in Q2 and ninth in Q3, he was revelling in the conditions.

When the team saw his competitiveness relative to the others it decided to bring him in for a fresh set of tyres. This decision was made just too late and he failed to get to the start/finish line by 10sec.

With that, he might have got as high as eighth, given that there was only a 0.06sec deficit to Button. Tonio Liuzzi's sister car was set up for the dry, to cover the possibility of no rain on Sunday, and was therefore compromised in qualifying. He was 1.4sec slower than Vettel in Q2 and back in 15th.

Neither Renault got a car into the run-off, Giancarlo Fisichella and Heikki Kovalainen down in 11th and 12th. "The balance was actually really good," said Heikki, "there was just no grip." Engineering chief Pat Symonds admitted that it had probably opted for too little downforce for the conditions, but was optimistic that this would pay dividends in the race, weather permitting.