• Italian Grand Prix - qualifying

Vettel beats McLaren pair for pole

Sebastian Vettel gave Red Bull its first pole at Monza © Getty Images

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• Race:
• Italian Grand Prix

• Championship:
• FIA Formula One World Championship

• Drivers:
• Jenson Button
• |
• Lewis Hamilton
• |
• Sebastian Vettel

• Teams:
• McLaren
• |
• Red Bull

Sebastian Vettel beat Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button to secure his tenth pole position of the season at the Italian Grand Prix.

Vettel's time of 1:22.275 was almost half a second quicker than Hamilton, with Button just 0.052s further back. Fernando Alonso took fourth, 0.1s ahead of Mark Webber. Felipe Massa was sixth ahead of Vitaly Petrov and Michael Schumacher, while Nico Rosberg took ninth after setting his time on medium tyres, and Bruno Senna will start tenth having not set a Q3 time.

Vettel topped the timesheets at the end of the first runs but then had to catch a slide on his second lap and aborted, forcing him to complete a slowing down lap to cool his KERS. All of the cars were in a queue for their final lap, but Button and Hamilton pitted, while Alonso took fourth before Vettel improved his time by 0.3s to cement his position.

It was also Vettel who set an early benchmark in the second session as he became the first man to go under the 1m23s mark. Button got close to that time, while Hamilton needed a late run having tried to get through on medium tyres. The real action was for 10th place though, as Senna pipped Paul di Resta with the very last lap by just 0.006s, with di Resta being told that the difference was a tow from Hamilton's McLaren.

Q1 threatened to be a bit of a non-event as Pastor Maldonado lost the rear end of his Williams on the exit of Parabolica having opened his DRS too early. He spun in to the barrier on the inside of the track, but fortunately he only broke the front wing and was able to get back out with five minutes remaining.

Maldonado delivered a quick lap to leave his team-mate Barrichello in the drop zone, and when the second Williams also made it through that left Jaime Alguersuari as the man to drop out ahead of the usual suspects of Lotus, Virgin and HRT - where Daniel Ricciardo outqualified Tonio Liuzzi for the first time.

Chris Medland is an assistant editor on ESPNF1

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