Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel on pole in Australian Grand Prix

Red Bull's world champion Sebastian Vettel claimed pole position for the season-opening Australian Grand Prix for the second year in a row with a dominant performance in qualifying on Saturday.

The 23-year-old German set the quickest time in all three sessions under grey skies at Albert Park, capping off his day with a searing lap of one minute 23.529 seconds, some half a second faster than his time last year.

 McLaren's Lewis Hamilton will line up alongside Vettel on the front row of the grid after a late lap of 1.24.307 knocked Vettel's Australian team mate Mark Webber (1.24.395) out of second place on the timesheets.

 Jenson Button, who has won here the last two years, will line up alongside Webber, after setting the fourth quickest time (1.24.779) for McLaren, leaving Ferrari's Fernando Alonso on the third row in fifth place next to Renault's Vitaly Petrov.

 "Although the gap now might appear to be big, it's a long season and a lot of things can happen," said Vettel, who failed to finish the race last year.

 "It's a good position to be in, and I'm very happy with that (but) we need to keep our feet on the ground."                                            McLaren struggled with unreliability in winter testing and Hamilton paid tribute to the "fantastic job" done by the team to be so competitive.

 "Absolutely thrilled to be here today, we've really got ourselves back on track and although there's a lot of work to do we laid a fantastic base," the 2008 world champion said.

 Webber is aiming to become the first Australian to win his home grand prix and was clearly disappointed at being so far behind his team mate.

 "I'm not overly rapt to be third on the grid," he said. "I wasn't really in the fight for pole and I need to address that."

 Nico Rosberg steered his Mercedes to seventh place on the grid ahead of Brazilian Felipe Massa on a disappointing day for Ferrari.   

 "Position we are happy, distance from pole we are not so happy, so it's what we have to look at analyse tonight," twice former champion Alonso said.

 Seven-times world champion Michael Schumacher failed to fulfil the promise of good pre-season testing with Mercedes when he was unable to get through to the final session of qualifying by 0.089 seconds despite a late flying lap.

 His former Ferrari team mate Rubens Barrichello spun his Williams off the track in the second session and was forced to leave his car stuck in the gravel without having registered a time. The Brazilian will start 17th.

 HRT's Vitantonio Liuzzi and Narain Karthikeyan failed to get within 107% of the best time in the first qualifying session so will not be allowed to race on Sunday, although they can appeal to the stewards.

The start of the season was delayed by two weeks after the Bahrain race was called off because of civil unrest in the Gulf kingdom.