Sakhir, 5th April

The headline that English speaking newspapers and magazines have been waiting on for a long time now finally came true at the Sakhir circuit today, as Poland's Robert Kubica took his and the BMW-Sauber team's first ever F1 pole position. Last year's Bahrain winner Felipe Massa put his F2008 on the front row in second place, with his Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro team-mate behind him in fourth spot on the outside of row 2. Third place went to Lewis Hamilton.
While Kimi was fractionally outside the eventual fight for the top place on the grid, the other three had quite a dice to decide the final shape of the top of the grid.
Felipe, who had dominated proceedings so far this weekend, just missed out on the best grid position, mentioning that, although not badly delayed, he did encounter a few difficulties with traffic.
As for Kimi, the Finn felt his car was not at its best over the one lap discipline. However, both Ferrari men are confident they can challenge for top honours on Sunday afternoon.


As usual, it won't be until the first run of pit stops that everyone can see what fuel loads were used today. The third row sees Heikki Kovalainen and his McLaren-Mercedes in fifth and the Sauber-BMW of Nick Heidfeld in sixth place.
Track conditions and the weather will play important roles when the lights go out tomorrow at 2.30 in the afternoon, local time, at the start of the 57 lap race. The mixture of sand, dust and rubber from other race categories makes for a slippery mixture, especially off the racing line. This means that although the 5.412 kilometre desert track has some genuine passing opportunities, moving off line to pass another car is always going to be risky and, as we have seen at the first two races this year, piloting these machines without traction control is not quite as easy as some thought it might be.