Final Twist in McLaren Drama

The circuit's sinuous layout looked likely to favour the British team, but no one could have foreseen just how the grid was settled. By MARK HUGHES

Fernando Alonso's lap was a beauty, but given 'Pitlanegate' that had just played out, few were paying attention to it. The delaying of Lewis Hamilton's final out-lap by Alonso's stationary car in the pitlane was the overriding story.

Alonso got to the start/finish line before the session closed with 1.32sec to spare, and with the pressure on and the championship fight taking on a new dimension, now was the time to produce an exquisite pressure lap. That is exactly what he did.

Unlike Hamilton, Alonso couldn't get the super-soft tyres to work for him, couldn't keep the graining at bay long enough not to lose more time in the final sector than he gained in the first.

So, his task now that Hamilton had been denied a second new-tyre lap was to use a scrubbed set of the harder tyres to beat Lewis's provisional pole - set on the super-softs. That time was 1m19.781s...

Upon completion of the middle sector, Fernando can see he is on-course to do it. Just the hairpin and the final turn to go: brake late, a little too late. He has to wait to get the entry speed down and is late into the turn, misses the apex, running him out wide, but still with good momentum. Keep it going, this is still on. Good front-end bite into the final turn, lots of momentum, race to the line and he shades the thwarted Hamilton by just over a tenth. Pole position, but in his wake a storm.

The time he had been sitting stationary in his pit came under far more scrutiny than the 1m19.674s it took to complete the lap.

Hamilton, forced to rely on his first new-tyre run, was left fuming, his pitlane delay meaning he missed the timing beam by around 3sec.

Just as at Monaco, his way of using a more oversteery balance to get his direction change meant he was giving the front tyres an easier time than his team-mate and, as a consequence, was one of very few drivers who could make the Bridgestone super-soft last long enough to make it a faster tyre over one lap than the soft. But he wasn't being asked many questions about his tyre choice - there was a bigger news story than that.

The stewards would punish Alonso by relegating him five grid places, leaving Hamilton on pole. The controversy in the McLaren pits overshadowed the dramas that unfolded at Ferrari, where Felipe Massa, after messing up his first new-tyre lap in Q2 with a big moment at the final turn, came in for a fresh set but was sent out without having been refuelled.

The team - unused to having to make a second run in Q2 - simply forgot! They realised their mistake before he'd got out of the pitlane and called on him to stop. Ferrari mechanics rushed up to the end to push their man back.

The time lost doing this meant the tyres had been out of their blanket heaters for too long to give him the necessary temperature - and he struggled to find a single apex on the lap that followed, leaving him in a disastrous 14th.

But even with the correct tyre temperatures the Ferrari generally lagged a couple of tenths behind the McLaren through the practices, bugged by excessive understeer, particularly at the end of the lap.

"We sort of expected this at this track," said Raikkonen. "We just can't get the front tyres working properly in the early laps." This left him vulnerable to the light BMW of Nick Heidfeld, which duly pipped him for third.

Extreme graining of the front super-softs in Q2 led Nick to opt for the harder tyres in Q3, and on these he found the balance he needed, though even with a comparable fuel load, he was 0.5sec off the McLaren pace.

Robert Kubica wasn't in a position to fight with his team-mate, a sensor problem in the gearbox robbing him of full acceleration, most noticeably on the upshifts. With an extra 4.2kg of fuel (worth only around 0.15sec over Heidfeld) he was over 0.6sec slower and back in seventh place.

Nico Rosberg was in flying form in the Williams. With a similar fuel load to Heidfeld and Alonso, he was fifth fastest, albeit 0.4sec off the BMW.

The car's natural slow-corner oversteer balance actually seemed to help it here over one lap, where it was vital to keep front-tyre graining at bay for as long as possible. He set his time on the super-softs. Team-mate Alex Wurz was around 0.7sec slower in Q2 and failed to make it through to the run-off.

Toyota enjoyed its best qualifying of the year, with Ralf Schumacher achieving sixth on the grid, Jarno Trulli ninth.

"For the first time with one of our cars we needed just one flying lap to get into Q3," said chassis chief Pascal Vasselon. Trulli was the one who achieved this feat and so was somewhat disappointed with his lap in the run-off. It was still a net 0.35sec slower than Ralf's once account was taken of a slightly higher fuel load. He was puzzled: "The car just felt somehow heavier to drive."

Splitting the Toyotas was Giancarlo Fisichella's Renault, which was a good save after almost falling foul of traffic at the first hurdle of Q1. He was happy to have found a set-up that allowed more consistency from the new front wing introduced at the last race. But much less happy to be demoted five places to 13th as a penalty for impeding Sakon Yamamoto in Q1 - this triggered by his own avoidance of Mark Webber at the time.

Team-mate Heikki Kovalainen suddenly lost the balance of his car at the critical moment in Q2 and was left back in 12th. "I don't know what happened," he reported.

"We put on the super-soft for my first run in Q2 but there was too much understeer. So we went back to the harder tyre on which I'd had a good balance before. It seemed a logical decision at the time but I just couldn't find the same feeling."

His time in Q1 would have been good for sixth in Q2.

Webber again got the Red Bull through to Q3 but was then slowest in the run-off. "Yeah, it almost seems a bit pointless getting into the run-off when you don't have the pace to get very far up in it," he rued of being committed to his fuel load while team-mate David Coulthard, 0.3sec slower in Q2 and 11th, was of course free to fuel optimally.