F1: Abu Dhabi qualifying lives up to promise

Abu Dhabi is home to the new Ferrari Theme Park. There's a huge, really huge, roof painted in Ferrari colours. And Ferrari have Abu Dhabi painted on their rear wing. It's the place that Jean Todt made his first appearance as head of the FIA, and spent rather too long in the Ferrari garage.

And it's the place that a Ferrari was slowest in qualifying and his team mate didn't make it into the top ten.

Ferrari have, to put it mildly, had a bad year. But Raikkonen and Massa managed to amass sufficient points for them to be battling with McLaren for second place in the Constructors' Championship.

But barring something going horribly wrong with Hamilton's car tomorrow, his pole position - spectacularly faster than anyone else - will seal that for McLaren.

Seeing Formula One cars on the new track showed two things that the Porsche race did not.

First, to make the flat track more challenging, several high speed corners have adverse camber: get the exit speed wrong and off into the run-off areas.

The run-offs are hard : there are no gravel traps. But extra-thick deformable barriers are considered to be a good option. After all, one of the reasons for using gravel is that it slows cars down even in the wet. It's not going to rain in Abu Dhabi.

Reflecting on the first race of the season, one of the major complaints about driving into dusk was the glare from the sun. In qualifying, which started in the light and ended in the dark, the sun glared for about 15 minutes. As it got lower, the glare stopped - and any driver with romance in his heart will be distracted by the biggest, reddest sun - dark comes quickly in the tropics and in the Gulf, the sun seems so close you can touch it. But only for a few minutes.

The track lighting is a totally different concept from that used in Singapore. There the lights are suspended above the catch-fencing. In Abu Dhabi, they are on 120 foot tall towers, like sports stadium lights. But unlike those lights, they do not appear to cast shadows: there is no "star effect" that ball-sports players' shadows show up as.

As for qualifying, Trulli sparkled - holding P1 for a substantial slice of Q3. Then, in the last two minutes, came a storm.

As the pole changed rapidly, Button and Barrichello, who had been fast all weekend, ended up slithering down the grid as first Webber, then Vettel then Hamilton went faster than each other to take the top three places.

Hamilton will shoot off using KERS tomorrow: he is by far the fastest around this circuit. In a season where the first ten cars have often been covered by less than a second, to see Hamilton almost seven tenths faster than the P2 car is astonishing.

It's a guess that the Brawns are travelling heavy, intending to make the most of the light. Certainly, they were not on their best pace in Q3.

The Red Bulls had struggled with set up until half way through Q3 - then it was as if someone had found the "on" switch. Whatever they did, it was spectacularly successful.