Below is the weight of each car following qualifying for the Brazilian Grand Prix, sorted by qualifying position.

Pos Driver Weight (kg)
1. Barrichello Brawn-Mercedes 650.5
2. Webber Red Bull-Renault 656.0
3. Sutil Force India-Mercedes 656.5
4. Trulli Toyota 658.5
5. Raikkonen Ferrari 651.5
6. Buemi Toro Rosso-Ferrari 659.0
7. Rosberg Williams-Toyota 657.0
8. Kubica BMW-Sauber 656.0
9. Nakajima Williams-Toyota 664.0
10. Alonso Renault 652.0
11. Kobayashi Toyota 671.5*
12. Alguersuari Toro Rosso-Ferrari 671.5*
13. Grosjean Renault 677.2*
14. Button Brawn-Mercedes 672.0*
15. Liuzzi Force India-Mercedes 680.0*
16. Vettel Red Bull-Renault 683.5*
17. Kovalainen McLaren-Mercedes 656.5*
18. Hamilton McLaren-Mercedes 661.0*
19. Heidfeld BMW-Sauber 650.5*
20. Fisichella Ferrari 683.5*

* Declared weight

Update: Vitantonio Liuzzi has been given a five-place penalty following an engine change.

After a disastrous qualifying session at Interlagos, where he failed to make it past Q2 after struggling for pace on wet tyres, Button knows that he will need to go on the attack from his 14th grid slot to have any chance of scoring the points he needs to win the crown here.

“It is going to have to be a hell of a race from me, and I don’t want to just be picking up a couple of points,” said the deeply disappointed Button about his prospects for Sunday’s race.

“I want a much better result than that, so I am going to be fighting tomorrow – as I am sure there will be a couple of other people fighting through the back.

“With the weather I don’t know what is going to happen. I would rather it was dry. We have a very good pace in the dry, and there are good possibilities for overtaking so I think it could be a fun race in the dry – and it is a going to be a hell of a race.”

Although Button’s boss Ross Brawn has said he will not be bothered if the world title battle between his drivers is not resolved until the final race, Button has said there will be little comfort in simply ending Red Bull Racing and Sebastian Vettel’s hopes tomorrow.

“You want it done as soon as possible, for sure,” he said. “Today was frustrating. We felt we had very good pace in the wet this morning, and also in Q1. So it is just frustrating.

“Yeah, it is difficult to know where the pace went really. And it is the smallest of set-up changes that made a massive difference in qualifying. I suppose you could say it was a slightly wrong call – but when you make a set-up change like we did with the tyre pressures it should not be that big. But we found that it was.”

And highlighting the level of frustration he was experiencing, Button said he did not know whether team-mate Rubens Barrichello had run with different tyre pressures to help the Brazilian scrape through Q2.

“I don’t know,” he said. “You will have to ask the engineers [that]. I haven’t asked the question yet, I have been too pissed off to ask any serious questions. But we will run through all the information tonight.

“We’ve had to do our fuel load so that is what we have been concentrating on most of all, for tomorrow. It could be wet, it could be dry tomorrow. It is a tough one but we have the option to choose fuel loads, and we will see hopefully quite soon what people are running. That is the only positive you can take from starting where we are.”

Ross Brawn says he has no problem with the drivers’ championship being decided in the final race of the season, as long as it’s only his two drivers fighting for the title.

“As long as it is between our two drivers I would be very happy. That’s the key element,” said Brawn after qualifying for the Brazilian Grand Prix.

“It would be fantastic if it went to Abu Dhabi between Jenson and Rubens I think that would make a fantastic final to the season.”

He added: “Let’s hope we can go in to the last race with our two drivers fighting for the championship, I think that would be a fitting finale to the season.”

Rubens Barrichello qualified on pole position on Saturday while team-mate Jenson Button suffered a big blow to his chances of wrapping up the title at Interlagos after finishing down in 14th position.

Barrichello is 14 points behind Button in the standings, having outscored his British team-mate in four of the last five races.

Brawn reckons things are now going Barrichello’s way following a very strong start to the season from Button, but says the Brazilian was never far from the Briton’s pace.

“He wasn’t that far behind in the first half, some races just didn’t go well for him,” Brawn added. “What I saw in the first half of the season was that there were occasions in the middle of the race when he didn’t have the pace.

“What I’ve seen in the second half, as we saw in Valencia and Monza, he has now got the pace in the middle of the race and that is where he seems to have changed. Now whether that is because we are finding better set-ups or what, I don’t know.

“There is no single thing that you can say made a difference. He changed the brake material that he was using during the year, which we think probably helped. Because the one he was using was a bit too aggressive so this calmed things down a bit, which may have helped in.

“I think it’s just a fine balance with both drivers in the team and it’s swinging a bit more towards Rubens at the moment.”

Brawn admitted Button is facing a difficult race tomorrow starting from so far down.

“There is a risk. Jenson is pretty experienced and he knows he is going to have to be sensible. But there is nothing we can do about that. It is the same risk that Sebastian faces as well. So he has got the same problem.

“I’m not sure that Liuzzi will make it to the grid so therefore you have got Jenson and Sebastian [Vettel] next to each other trying to find their way through the lesser experienced drivers.”

And the team boss insisted he had no problems with the rivalry between his drivers and their staff.

“It’s up to me to control that,” he said when asked about Barrichello’s race engineer Jock Clear’s jubilant reaction at the Brazilian’s pole.

“We all know Jock gets pretty excited, but Shov [Andrew Shovlin, Button's race engineer] gets on with it in his own quiet way. Jenson’s engineer is just as competitive, and perhaps not as demonstrative in the way he approaches things.

“But no, there is a natural competition between both sides of the garage and it starts with the drivers and goes through members of the team.

“But in the end they have all got to do what is in the best interests of the team, and they know that. It’s good to see some enthusiasm.”

Source: Autosport.com

Vettel, who must finish at least second at Interlagos to maintain any hope of taking the world championship fight down to the final race of the season, failed to make it out of a wet Q1 and will start the race from 16th position.

But Horner believes the performance was not the doing of the German driver, who has won three times already this year, and was instead down to his inability to get a clear track while the wet circuit was at its quickest.

“We’re frustrated,” Horner said. “It’s desperately unlucky for Sebastian, because there was a window of about two-three laps when the circuit was at its best in Q1.

“With cars making mistakes ahead of him and yellow flags, it just never fell right for him, and he had to abort those laps – which proved very expensive.

“When he finally did get a couple of clear laps at the end, the circuit was in such a poor conditions, there was no chance for him to set a representative time.”

Horner believes that the performance of Vettel’s team-mate Mark Webber, who will start from the front row, was more indicative of the pace of the Red Bulls at Interlagos.

With the set-up of both cars geared more towards a dry race than a wet one too, he reckons both drivers will prove competitive in the race.

“As we saw from Mark’s performance, it was clear that the car was very competitive in the wet or the dry, and on both extreme and intermediate tyres, and for sure, Sebastian would have been right there if he’d have just snuck into Q2,” he added.

“It will be a long race and it always throws up a few curve balls here. He [Vettel] just has to go for it. He’s got [championship leader] Jenson [Button] just ahead of him, which is a surprise, and Mark’s got to go for the front. We’ve just got to push as hard as we can from the first lap to the last lap.”

Source: Autosport.com

The McLaren driver set the pace in Q1 shortly after it was restarted.

But the world champion was pushed down the order while others made the most of being on track while conditions were at their best and was left unable to make it into Q2 for the first time since Silverstone.

“That was a pretty poor performance from us,” said Hamilton. “Our car was so bad in the wet, you couldn’t even go flat-out on the straights. That’s how little grip I had.

“We were running a dry set-up, which is a lot stiffer than you would normally go for in the wet, so that obviously hampered us. You can see the downforce levels really show in these conditions.”

With a few minutes left, and laptimes having dropped off by more than seven seconds, Hamilton had a frightening moment exiting the quick turn five.

After aquaplaning off the track, he then spun twice on the wet grass, but did not hit anything and was able to continue slowly back to the pits.

“I was only on 70 per cent throttle then,” the British driver added. “And it just let loose on me.”

Hamilton’s team-mate Heikki Kovalainen fared only marginally better, qualifying his McLaren 16th as neither car made it into Q2.

Source: Autosport.com

Toro Rosso’s Swiss rookie made it into the the top ten shoot-out for the third time this season as he kept his head through the red-flagged Q2 session.

“Of course I am happy, as sixth is my best ever qualifying result,” he said. “It was a difficult session and I just stayed in the car, trying to remain focused. Our goal for tomorrow is to score some points. But with this kind of weather anything can happen.

“I would prefer it to be dry tomorrow, but so far this weekend, we have been quick whatever the track conditions, so I will be fighting my hardest if it’s wet or dry.”

Jaime Alguersuari also enjoyed a good day in the sister STR4, equalling his best starting position of the season.

“That was not bad and I’m happy with the result,” he said afterwards. There was a lot of water and it was easy to crash, so my priority was to stay on the track, making no mistakes.

“Visibility was very bad in these conditions, so I hope we have better conditions for the race. I think I did the best I could today. To make it through to Q3 would have required using the Intermediate tyre, but we gambled on sticking on the Extreme and the final result is pretty good anyway.”

Source: Autosport.com