The two 150º Italias will start tomorrow from the third row, with Fernando Alonso fifth and Felipe Massa in sixth place. With the two Red Bulls on the front row and two McLarens on the second, the starting grid reflects the relative strengths in the field, but there’s a hint of disappointment for those few hundredths, 17 of them, that separate Fernando from the front row. Behind the untouchable Vettel (1.44.381) came Webber (1.44.732) but Fernando stopped the clocks in a time of 1.44.874: in between are the two McLarens less than a tenth off the Ferrari.

Red Bull Racing

Christian Horner

“A fantastic team performance. To secure an all front row is phenomenal and it’s our best qualifying performance in Singapore. It was a tricky qualifying session, navigating the traffic early on and needing to get clean laps. It came down to Q3 and Sebastian produced a phenomenal first lap which was good enough for pole. On the second run he made a small mistake at Turn 10 and aborted the lap to save the tyres, which puts him in great shape for tomorrow. Mark made a big step on the last run – it was a good effort from him at a track which he has not been totally comfortable at all weekend, so a great performance by him and a great effort by the team to have locked out the front row.”

CyrilDumont, Renault

“It was difficult to do a better result than this today. I think from the beginning of the weekend Sebastian’s pace was pretty good and he did a really solid qualifying session. Mark did a great first sector, which allowed him to come back and lock out the front row, so it’s a good way to start tomorrow’s race. We will see tomorrow – many things can happen, there are lots of corners and the weather can change, so it can be quite difficult – but I’m happy with this start to the weekend.”

Vodafone McLaren-Mercedes

Martin Whitmarsh, Team principal, Vodafone McLaren Mercedes

“Jenson did a fantastic job to recover from what by his own admission was a difficult day at the office yesterday, to post the third-fastest qualifying lap today. In fact, he was a bit unlucky to be pipped by Mark [Webber] at the very end of the session, and he’d been looking good for a front-row grid slot until then. Lewis drove really well today too, and will consequently start from the second row alongside Jenson tomorrow. In fact, he may have been able to improve on that time, had he been able to put in an extra lap in Q3, but unfortunately we had an issue with our refuelling process. That, combined with a puncture and a randomly selected visit to the FIA weighbridge, both in Q2, made for a rather eventful afternoon for him. So, to sum up, we’re very confident that both our drivers will be able to mount robust and combative challenges in tomorrow evening’s race, and as always the Singaporean Grand Prix promises to provide enough floodlit drama to have Formula 1 fans glued to their TV screens all over the world.”

Scuderia Ferrari

Stefano Domenicali

“This qualifying mirrors the championship. There is one driver and car combination that is all but untouchable and then four drivers who are fighting it out to the nearest hundredth of a second, the same four who can be found battling for second place in the classification. Clearly, we are a bit disappointed today because in fact, Fernando came very close to getting a slot on the front row, but we are well aware that one must accept the reality of the situation, without beating ourselves up about it. Felipe got the job done, extricating himself from a couple of complicated moments and getting the grid position that one could have expected. Now we must concentrate on tomorrow night’s race, which will be extremely long and tough, both for the drivers and the cars. We will try and do our best, exploiting every opportunity that comes our way.”

Pat Fry

“Reading the results sheet, one could say it reflects the current pecking order which has characterised this season, but it’s natural that when the gaps are so close, at least among those battling for pole, there’s a hint of disappointment. All the same, Fernando did a great job, getting the maximum out of the car we gave him. If we look at the gap to pole, we can say that, returning to a high downforce track, running the softest Pirelli compounds, we are back to the situation we had seen before, for example in Germany and Hungary, while in Spa and Monza we suffered a lot more. The start will be important tomorrow, an area where we have done rather well recently: we will therefore be trying to repeat that to make up some places. Then it will be important to see how the tyres behave, which will be a decisive factor for the strategy. On this track, you cannot get anything wrong, because the slightest error and you can easily find yourself in the barriers. We can therefore expect all sorts of scenarios and we will have to be clever to exploit any opportunities that might present themselves.”

Mercedes GP Petronas

Ross Brawn

“It was a fairly straightforward qualifying session for us today and we got the maximum performance from the car. We were mindful of the need for good tyres in the race, and with both drivers saving a set of supersofts, we are in reasonable shape for tomorrow. Michael decided not to set a lap time in Q3 for this reason; he could have challenged Nico but it was more sensible to save the tyres. We have moved forward with the car, and the changes that we have made for this weekend look to be working well. We look forward to an interesting and challenging race tomorrow, and there should be a lot of opportunities.”

Norbert Haug

“Our team have worked very hard and constructively since yesterday when we struggled on this challenging high downforce track, and Nico and Michael achieved the best possible result today with our current package. We took a disciplined approach throughout qualifying in order to save tyres for the race, and both Nico and Michael will have a fresh set of options available which should be valuable in the race. We only used prime tyres in Q1 and, unlike the cars ahead, attempted only one outing in Q3. Our target for tomorrow is to improve our positions from today and to continue our trend from Spa and Monza.”

Force India F1 Team

Dr. Vijay Mallya, Chairman & Team Principal

“We knew coming into this weekend that we had the potential to go well here, and so it proved today. It’s a high downforce track and the car has been fast since the start of practice. In every session we’ve shown top ten pace. So it’s satisfying to convert that into a qualifying result with two cars inside the top ten – the first time we’ve achieved that this season. It’s an especially good result considering the time we lost with Paul’s car yesterday in second practice and he’s done a good job to recover from that. The target tomorrow is clearly to build on today’s showing and come away with both cars in the points.”

Sauber F1 Team

Peter Sauber, Team Principal

“Our car has got faster, so this is positive. Being a rookie, Sergio is driving here for the first time and has put in a very strong performance. Unfortunately it just wasn’t enough to make it to Q3. Kamui’s performance was good enough to make it into the top ten, but he failed to take his chance when he was riding the kerbs too much and the car left the ground.”

Giampaolo Dall’Ara, Head of Track Engineering

“Performance wise we are fairly happy, as we are where we expected to be. With a bit more luck maybe we would have got a top ten position, but still Sergio can do a good race from there. For Kamui that was unfortunate. Luckily he didn’t hit concrete, but the angle he went in was not nice. However, now we need to look at the car and hope the chassis is not broken.”

AT&T Williams F1

Sam Michael, Technical Director

“Rubens and Pastor have secured good positions to start the race from and from where we can definitely target a points-scoring result tomorrow. Getting everything right on the set-up makes a big difference on a street circuit like this while managing tyre pressures throughout the session was also key. We didn’t have any technical issues in qualifying so we can concentrate fully on the race tomorrow.”

Scuderia Toro Rosso

Giorgio Ascanelli

“So far, we have had a couple of eventful days and although we got both cars into Q2, we are not in that good shape. Our grid positions owe something to Kobayashi’s unfortunate accident and the problems of others. We have lost pace compared to Monza. Due to the lack of track time yesterday because of Seb’s accident, for which I do not blame him and Jaime’s technical problem, there are a couple of set-up solutions we were unable to exploit. Because of this, we had to concentrate more on race preparation this morning and less on qualifying. In addition, we ran a technical solution yesterday that Jaime found to his liking, but I took the decision we could not run it for the rest of the weekend, as we had a problem with it. Therefore today, he did not have the same level of confidence in the car. As for Sebastien, he has had a less complicated time, giving him greater confidence in the car and he drove well, putting together a good lap, so we can be happy with him for that. What a driver needs here more than anything is confidence, therefore, as we make up for the time lost, I do believe we can be in better shape for the race tomorrow, especially because of the fact we focussed more on race set-up today.”

Lotus-Renault GP

James Allison, Technical Director

“although we approached Singapore buoyed by recent good performances at Monza and Spa, this weekend has brought us back down to earth with a bang. Both the car crews and the drivers worked diligently to try to eke as much out of the cars as they could, but four seconds per lap is, unfortunately, a yawning chasm that cannot be crossed with springs, roll bars and ride heights. Monaco, Hungary and now Singapore have shown clearly that we have a problem at circuits dominated by slow speed corners. From Spa, just two races ago and only a few rear wing settings different to Singapore, we have lost around 1.8sec/lap of competitiveness and around eight grid slots. Although some improvement was made to the nervousness experienced yesterday, the rear grip under braking and traction was still very poor. This is a challenging circuit; free practice and qualifying have been sprinkled with cars finishing their session in the barriers. It will only be harder still in the race as the surface will be liberally covered in marbles. Several cars were doing long runs in the third practice session which is often indicative of concerns over brake wear; this is not a concern we have so we may prosper a little there. However, if we are going to score points it will be by virtue of other people’s misfortune and making to the flag unscathed.”

Team Lotus

Thierry Salvi, Renault Sport F1 Support Leader

“We worked very hard last night on improving the driveability of the engines and the braking stability and give ourselves the right choice of engine maps for qualifying. The results prove we made the right choices and as this track has such specific demands on the engine, in terms of traction and maximising fuel economy, I think we have put ourselves in the right place to be able to push tomorrow. This is one of the hardest tracks on fuel economy in particular, so even though we are already good in that area, we have a specific map for the race tomorrow that I think will give the drivers a chance to push when they need to, and help to make sure they can both finish the race.”

Mike Gascoyne, Chief Technical Officer

“A reasonable effort from us in qualifying today. Jarno was not happy with his car in either session today so we need to look at why that has changed since yesterday. With Heikki his first qualifying lap was good but on his second run he was compromised by the cars ahead when he would have definitely gone quicker, so it is encouraging to know there is still more outright pace in the car than we extracted today. The aim is the same as it always is for us on Sundays – have a strong performance, bring both cars home and do the best we can to push the cars in front.”

Tony Fernandes, Team Principal

“I am encouraged to see that the upgrade we have brought here has pulled us a little closer to the cars ahead but qualifying tonight was possibly not our smartest day in the office – we sent Heikki out just behind Liuzzi which definitely compromised his quickest lap, but on the positive side the changes we made overnight helped us to retrieve the couple of seconds we seemed to have lost yesterday. We know that we can mix it with a couple of the established teams on race pace so we need to make sure we have a good start, use whatever chances we can to overtake, something that is particularly difficult here, and get both cars home across the line.”

Marussia Virgin Racing

John Booth, Team Principal

“What we learned from yesterday is that the degradation on both the Soft and Supersoft tyres looks reasonably high and we therefore opted to save sets of the Soft tyre for the race. Earlier, in FP3, we focused our efforts more on preparation for qualifying, with both drivers using only one set of each compound. They seemed to be suffering with identical issues and unfortunately we don’t seem to have made much progress towards resolving them, so it’s not surprising that in qualifying we were somewhat disappointed. The Singapore Grand Prix is normally fairly chaotic and we’ll be looking to ensure that both cars stay as reliable as ever and with a good strategy I hope we can create some opportunities in the race.”

HRT F1 Team

Colin Kolles, Team Principal: “In the third practice session this morning we’ve continued to work on the race set-up and the gap to our nearest rivals has reduced considerably. Both Daniel and Tonio made the most of their first set of tyres in the qualifying session and were ahead of the Virgins. However, with the second set, they were unable to stay ahead although Daniel was only one tenth off D’Ambrosio. Tomorrow’s race will be long and tough for the drivers and cars alike and we need to be prepared. I hope both cars can finish the race so that we can achieve our eighth double finish of the season.”