Vettel takes Hungarian pole with ease

F1 Grand Prix, GP Hungary, Hungaroring

Sebastian Vettel has put in an expected pole in a session where only his teammate could put up a slight threat. Webber however failed to improve on his final lap, handing the pole to Vettel. Fernando Alonso is the best of the rest, in third position.

The Hungaroring is famously known for its difficulty to make a pass on track, and with refuelling now gone, the qualifying session has become even more important.

Due to the rather short track, most of the cars are sitting in the pits in the early minutes of Q1. Robert Kubica is the first to take the track, along with his Russian teammate Vitaly Petrov. Both are fitted with the harder tyre compound.

Immediately when the Red Bulls are on track, the times are set as Vettel and Webber have been comfortably setting the pace all weekend. Vettel takes the early lead after 6 minutes, followed by Webber. Alonso later on puts his car in between the RBR's.

At this stage, the time differences are marginal. McLaren were already expecting this and are coutious not to make it into Q3. The least amount of bad luck could play into this. 6 minutes from the end, there are quite a few surprises in the timesheet. Alguersuari is 8th, De La Rosa 11th and Schumacher only 16th.

At the end of the session, Kobayashi is eliminated after his final flying lap was ruined by an HRT car. Timo Glock meanwhile beat all other new team cars on his final lap. Kovalainen is 20th, followed by Trulli, Di Grassi, Senna and Yamamoto, the latter being just 0.15s slower than his Brazilian team mate.

Felipe Massa is the first man to take the track in Q2, but it's only 4 minutes later when a benchmark time is set by Vettel, rounding the track in just 1:19.573. Alonso is third, a full second slower than Vettel.

Renault is going well so far as well, with Kubica 4th fastest, 0.4 seconds faster than his teammate in 5th place. Lewis Hamilton is 6th, with the second McLaren down in 9th place with 4 minutes left in this session.

In between the tremendous amount of action at the end of Q2, Rosberg suddenly moves up ino the top 10 after struggling all through this weekend. Michael Schumacher fails to do so and will be 14th on the grid tomorrow.

De La Rosa on the other hand surprisingly made it to Q3, just ahead of Hulkenberg. Out are the McLaren of Jenson Button, along with Barrichello, Sutil, Schumacher, Buemi, Liuzzi and Alguersuari.

Alonso then kicks off Q3, 15 seconds ahead of Massa. Interestingly, Rosberg, Hulkenberg and Petrov all start on used soft tyres as they have used already so many sets of options during this qualifying.

It is just impressive how quick Red Bull are here. Webber's first lap is a massive 8 tenths quicker than Alonso, and Vettel even shaves off another 4 tenths, making it 1:18.773.

3 minutes from the end, De La Rosa is on track with the two Renaults. Neither of them have already set a time. They're all setting a sluggish lap and Renault eventually are in the top 10, but nothing more really.

As Webber didn't improve on his final lap, Vettel held back as well and didn't set a better time, as they was really no competition apart from his teammate.