• Bahrain Grand Prix Qualifying

First blood to Vettel in Bahrain qualifying

Sebastian Vettel will start on pole ahead of Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso © Sutton Images

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Qualifying gallery

Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel will line up on pole position for the first race of the season after he pipped the two Ferraris of Felipe Massa in second and Fernando Alonso in third.

All three front runners attempted a time on soft tyres which they will have to use at the start of the race on Sunday. Vettel put together a very smooth lap and beat Massa to the top spot by just 0.141 seconds with a 1:54.101. He had been the pace setter in Q2 but Massa surprised by setting the fastest time of the two Ferraris, 0.35 seconds faster than Alonso. Lewis Hamilton in the McLaren, Nico Rosberg in the Mercedes and Mark Webber in the Red Bull made up the rest of the top six, with Webber over a second off the pace of his team-mate Vettel.

Michael Schumacher's prediction he would be off the pace in qualifying proved to be correct and he will line up seventh on the grid. He was around 0.3 seconds off his team-mate Rosberg, but managed to get ahead of 2009 champion Jenson Button who could only manage eighth, after just scraping through to Q3.

Also sneaking into the top ten were Renault's Robert Kubica in ninth and Force India's Adrian Sutil in tenth. The latter opted to run on hard tyres in preparation for the race tomorrow. They will line up ahead of Rubens Barrichello, Tonio Liuzzi, Nico Hulkenberg, Pedro de la Rosa, Sebastien Buemi, Kamui Kobayashi and Vitaly Petrov, who all dropped out in Q2.

The bottom seven was made up of the three new teams and Jaime Alguersuari. Karun Chandhok will start the race despite not taking part in any of the free practice sessions. He completed his first laps in the HRT F1 car and set a time of 2:04.904.

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