The Fast and the Furious

Lewis Hamilton stole pole position in China with a scintillating lap, prompting a tantrum from team-mate Fernando Alonso. By MARK HUGHES

Lewis Hamilton didn't need to drive arguably his best lap of the season. Sitting on the verge of the world championship, he didn't need to get pole position. But he did. He didn't need to worry about how he was lacking a couple of tenths of performance prior to the final qualifying session.

He could have let it slide - just as he was letting the rear of his car slide through most of the lap on Friday and into Saturday morning. "It was my first time here," he reminded us, "and I just kept chipping away at it. I was missing a little bit but I wasn't too concerned. I felt that if I didn't put too much effort into it, just a little bit, it might come."

Like the other top four runners, he did his first new-tyre Q3 run on the harder compound. With rain forecast for Sunday, it was important that enough scrubbed sets would be available - you don't want to be going on a damp track with brand new dries. As they each did these banker laps, the Ferraris were the fastest, with Lewis trailing Felipe Massa by 0.4sec. He was, however, marginally faster than Alonso at this point - for the first time in the weekend.

The key to the critical final runs on the softer medium tyre was going to be the out-lap balancing act. On the one hand, you needed to look after them on the out lap so they didn't give up before the end of the timed lap. On the other, you needed to push them enough so they were up to temperature for the crucial turn one/two/three at the start of the lap.

But so much for the technicalities: what Hamilton produced on his final run was a piece of cockpit magic. He melded together every piece of feel and data he'd picked up in the weekend to date and committed to it on each braking zone and corner entry.

It was a brilliantly neat but hugely committed lap. The wind had picked up a lot compared to the practice sessions and was blowing in a direction that made it a bigger help in turn seven than a hindrance elsewhere, enabling him to commit to the increased grip from the headwind there.

It was a lap that left team-mate Fernando Alonso - back in fourth, on a heavier fuel load but still 0.4sec adrift when weight-corrected - bewildered and paranoid. He'd been just 0.1sec slower on the first Q3 run and could not understand why that gap had ballooned. "I didn't make any mistakes on the lap," he said, "and I have no explanation."

Dark thoughts were preoccupying him. How could a guy in the same car on the same fuel load be half a second faster? No one had ever been half a second faster than him. Later, a McLaren door was banged off its hinges and a helmet was bounced off the floor. He later said he believed his tyres had been over-pressured for that second run, and any pretence now at a relationship between team and driver seems to have gone.

Kimi Raikkonen's Ferrari joined Hamilton on the front row 0.136sec away but on a significantly heavier fuel load. Weight-corrected, he was on a clear pole. The Ferrari had suffered a hydraulics problem at the end of Saturday practice, but was otherwise a potent tool, not as good as the McLaren in the tight confines of sector one, but flying down the straights and generally appearing to have a small but significant performance edge. Kimi put together a stunning lap in Q2 where he was fastest by 0.4sec, and was more than satisfied with his Q3 lap.

This was in stark contrast to team-mate Felipe Massa, third quickest after a critical error on his softer-tyre run at the end. "I just came into turn 11 a bit too quick," he said, "too aggressive, and lost the rear end. You need to take some risks and sometimes it doesn't work." His sector times before the crucial error suggested he wasn't going to beat Raikkonen anyway. This was despite running lighter than Kimi.

Just as in Japan a week earlier, the title-contending teams had to defend only from each other. As such they chose not to compromise their relative qualifying position by catering for the predicted rain on Sunday. All the others could, and to greater or lesser extents, did. Typhoon Krosa was on its way, due to hit late Sunday morning/ early afternoon.

BMW Sauber and Renault set up their cars heavily favouring wet conditions, with plenty of rear wing. It was enough to keep the latter out of Q3. For BMW, it was enough to restrict Nick Heidfeld and Robert Kubica to a respective seventh and ninth fastest.

All of which created a great Saturday opportunity for someone, and Red Bull's David Coulthard was the one who best exploited the opportunity with a clean, committed lap that put him fifth on the grid, albeit on a light fuel load, this after having gone 0.4sec faster than team-mate Mark Webber when both were low-fuelled in Q2. In Q3 and loaded with around 0.4sec more fuel than DC, Webber duly went 0.4sec slower, good enough for seventh.

The Red Bulls sandwiched the Toyota of Ralf Schumacher, in much better form than of late, with sixth fastest time. Against the pattern of most of the season, he was consistently faster than team-mate Jarno Trulli, who for once didn't make it out of Q2 and languished in 12th place. He was having real problems with the balance of his car and was even considering running the T-car from the pitlane the following day.

Jenson Button was another to take advantage of the Renault wet weather set-ups and the problems Williams was experiencing in getting the softer tyre to work to put the Honda into Q3. Regardless of the circumstances, to get a Honda RA107 around just 0.6sec slower than the BMWs, as he did in Q2, was a great achievement. He duly rounded out the top 10 in Q3.

Q2 had a topsy-turvy look to it, with Toro Rosso's Tonio Liuzzi and Sebastian Vettel sitting at the top of it and Nico Rosberg's Williams at the bottom. The Toro Rossos have definitely found a lot of performance in the last couple of rounds, the breakthrough coming after a fundamental rethink on weight distribution.