• Abu Dhabi Grand Prix - Qualifying

Hamilton takes pole from Webber

Lewis Hamilton took his sixth pole position of the season © Sutton Images

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• Race:
• Abu Dhabi Grand Prix

• Drivers:
• Lewis Hamilton
• |
• Sebastian Vettel
• |
• Mark Webber

• Teams:
• McLaren
• |
• Red Bull

Lewis Hamilton took pole position for the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix ahead of Mark Webber, while Sebastian Vettel was excluded from the results after running out of fuel and will start from the back of the grid.

On the opening runs, it was Hamilton who was comfortably quickest, beating second-placed Vettel by almost half a second. Only Webber and Fernando Alonso got within a second of Hamilton's time, and though some did improve on the second runs Hamilton's first lap was enough to take pole position.

Webber beat Vettel to second place, and Vettel then stopped on track at the end of the session. He was told to pull over by his team on the radio and pulled up under the Yas Hotel in the third sector. Four and half hours after the end of the session the stewards announced that Vettel did not have enough fuel in the car for a sample and he was therefore dropped from third to the back of the grid.

Pastor Maldonado delivered an impressive lap with one run in Q3 to take third on the grid ahead of Kimi Raikkonen and Jenson Button. Fernando Alonso will start sixth ahead of Nico Rosberg, Felipe Massa and Romain Grosjean.

As always it was a close session during Q2, with a late lap from Rosberg knocking Nico Hulkenberg down to 11th place. The result was that both Force India's dropped out - sandwiching Sergio Perez - while Michael Schumacher will start 13th and admitted he'd made an error during the session.

Jean-Eric Vergne was the man to drop out in Q1 once again, spinning his Toro Rosso at the penultimate corner on his best flying lap. Although he was able to attempt one more time, the flat spots were too much for him to improve. Heikki Kovalainen was 18th, but there was a notable performance from Charles Pic - absent in FP1 - to qualify 19th.

Vitaly Petrov was 10th ahead of Timo Glock, Pedro de la Rosa and Narain Karthikeyan. There was also an incident which saw Perez block Senna early on, but the stewards only issued a reprimand.

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