Shanghai, 13 April

Today’s qualifying was pretty much all about tyre management. At the end of the sessions, Scuderia Ferrari came away with a third place courtesy of Fernando Alonso and a fifth for Felipe Massa. Q1 went very smoothly, with the two drivers making just one run, both men on new Softs, to set a time good enough for the cut-off into Q2, They then made their first run in the next part on the same set of tyres, with everyone’s times being very quick. Then came one more run, this time on new Softs.

In Q3, nearly all the remaining ten drivers waited until there was less than three minutes to go, most of them doing just one run on new Softs, with the exception of Vettel in the Red Bull and Button the McLaren who did a single lap on the Medium. Fernando missed out on the front row by just two hundredths of a second and Felipe was only seven hundredths off fourth placed Rosberg in the Mercedes. The German’s team-mate, Lewis Hamilton, took pole in a time of 1.34.484.