Webber On Pole As Mclaren Find Qualifying Pace

Mark Webber seemingly eased to a third consecutive pole of the season to maintain Red Bull's dominance of the top grid slot in 2010.

The in-form Australian, who will be looking to make it three pole to flag victories in succession on sunday, recorded a lap time of one minute 26.295 to edge out former World Champion Lewis Hamilton, who will start from the front row for the first time since the season closing race of 2009.

"It hasn't beent the smoothest of weekends for us in terms of getting the running in", said Mark after suffering problems in Saturday's third practice session. "I was a little bit on the back foot going in to be honest but i knew if I dug deep it could be OK. And it worked out for us. I'm a little bit more confident for tomorrow"

Sebastien Vettel will be moderately pleased to have taken third on the grid after suffering problems when turning into left handed corners, particularly affecting his two flying laps in session 3, but having set the fastest time through both the first two sessions will be dissapointed that his session was blighted.

Jenson Button will start fourth, almost half a second down on the pole sitter, whilst Michael Schumacher continued to show improvement on his return with fifth. However, a spin in turn 8 left the German in the gravel trap and disrupted anyone following the Mercedes trying to set a faster lap. Fortunately for Michael, he will not have to start the race on those tyres, as his fast lap was set on a different set, in allignment with the new regulations this year which stipulates that the top 10 qualifiers must start the race on the same tyres they qualified on.

Fernando Alonso was the only major casualty of an interesting qualifying, reaching only 12th on the grid after a mistake on his penultimate Q2 lap.

"I pushed very hard in that lap. Anyway, I was slower than my fastest lap. I knew it was not enough.

We weren't quick enough today. Ninth and tenth in session one and I was already on the limit."

The Ferrari driver will again be left to recover the situation on Sunday afternoon.

Nico Rosberg, Robert Kubica, Felipe Massa, Vitaly Petrov and Kamui Kobayashi rounded out the top ten.