Austin, Texa: Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel grabbed pole position for the US Grand Prix and will start first Sunday after posting a qualifying time of 1:36.338 at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas.
The Red Bull superstar will be joined on the first row by teammate Mark Webber, who recorded a time of 1:36.441 in Saturday's qualifying. Frenchman Romain Grosjean, who drives for Lotus, and German Sauber driver Nico Hülkenberg will start third and fourth, respectively.
Vettel said after the Saturday qualifying, “It’s obviously great for the team to have both cars on the front row for tomorrow. It was a tricky session as the wind had picked up quite a bit since this morning; it does influence the behaviour of the car and it’s not that easy, especially in the corners, I wasn’t that happy with my first run in Q3, but I think I had a solid run at the end which was enough. It was very close with Mark, he seemed to get closer and closer as the weekend went on, so fortunately I was just able to stay ahead. I think he might have had a mistake on his final run. I’m very happy with pole position today, I like this place and the circuit and I’m looking forward to tomorrow. It’s important to start on the clean side, so we’ll see what we can do.”
Meanwhile, Webber said, “I didn’t think I had done enough on the second run in Q3, we (Seb and I) both had two shots with two sets of options. The first part of my final lap was very good, I was happy with that, but I didn’t quite get Turns 19 and 20; if I’d done what I did there initially in Q3, it would probably have been enough, but I tried to squeeze a bit more out and it’s easy to load the car a bit too much in these conditions. Sometimes you’re happy and think you’ve given your best, but today it slipped through the fingers. Well done to Seb, he put the three sectors together and I put two and a half together. I just dropped it in the last sector and it’s not satisfying when you do that, but I’m still pretty happy with second.”