By Ian Lockwood
April 4 2009

Despite qualifying seventh fastest for tomorrow’s 56-lap Malaysian Grand Prix, Mark Webber will gain a further two places on the grid courtesy of his Red Bull Racing team-mate Sebastian Vettel and Brawn GP driver Rubens Barrichello both having to take 10 and five grid place penalties respectively.

Once again, the Red Bull RB5 has featured strongly all weekend, the cars running reliably to allow both drivers to perform at the pointy end of the field throughout practice, proving themselves as the best of the “division two non-diffuser cars” and ease their way through to the top 10 in qualifying.

Webber was eighth fastest in opening practice with a best time of 1min 36.703s and fifth fastest in the afternoon session with a 1min .36.026s, just 3/10ths off the time posted by pace-setter Kimi Raikkonen. Webber posted the second fastest time in this morning’s final practice as the team prepared for the all-important qualifying with a time of 1min 36.048s.

“It’s been a pretty positive weekend for the team so far,” said Webber, “we’ve enjoyed better reliability than we did in Melbourne and all of our sessions went to plan testing-wise which gave us a very good foundation to fight everyone in qualifying. We knew it would be tight....and it was.”

Webber eased his way through qualifying, going second fastest initially with a time of 1min 35.027s on his second run in Q1 before winding up sixth, while in Q2 he was third fastest with a time of 1min 34.222.  Q3 was an extremely tight affair with Webber posting the 3^rd fastest time on scrubbed tyres on his first run of 1min 36.312, slipping to seventh before making his final run. He improved to a 1min 35.797s to go fourth fastest in the dying moments but ultimately slipped back to seventh although this became fifth on the grid for tomorrow’s race at the expense of Vettel and Barrichello.

“As usual qualifying was incredibly tight but it was quite an enjoyable session,” said Webber. “It was fantastic to drive the car around here in quail trim. I was happy with how I drove in Q3 – I couldn’t have got much more from the car although it would have been nice to have been at the other end of 1/10th separating Nico (Rosberg), Timo (Glock) and myself as we could have been starting third. However, we’ll see how starting from position five on the grid might benefit us tomorrow.”