page_title: 2009 Australian Grand Prix
section_title: Practice and qualifying
hierarchical_section_title: 2009 Australian Grand Prix / Report / Practice and qualifying
caption_attribution_description: English: Jenson Button at 2009 Australian Grand Prix, Melbourne, Australia
context_page_description: The 2009 Australian Grand Prix was a Formula One motor race held on 29 March 2009 at the Melbourne Grand Prix Circuit, Melbourne, Australia. It was the first race of the 2009 Formula One season. The 58-lap race was won by Jenson Button for the Brawn GP team after starting from pole position. Rubens Barrichello finished second in the other Brawn GP car, with Jarno Trulli third for Toyota.
  Brawn GP became the first constructor since Mercedes-Benz at the 1954 French Grand Prix to qualify on pole position, and then go on to win the race on their Grand Prix debut. The race also became the second race in Formula One history to finish under stabilised safety car conditions—after the 1999 Canadian Grand Prix—following a collision between Robert Kubica and Sebastian Vettel, who were running second and third, on lap 56.
context_section_description: Three practice sessions were held before the race; the first was held on Friday morning and the second on Friday afternoon. Both sessions lasted 1 hour and 30 minutes with weather conditions dry throughout. The third session was held on Saturday morning and lasted an hour, and was also dry throughout. The Williams cars of Nico Rosberg and Kazuki Nakajima set the pace, ending up first and second with only five-hundredths of a second splitting the two. The only other driver that was within half a second of them was Kimi Räikkönen's Ferrari, who was marginally behind Nakajima. Rubens Barrichello set the fourth fastest time in the first official session for the Brawn team, outpacing teammate Jenson Button, who could only muster up the sixth fastest lap. Heikki Kovalainen was the faster of the two McLaren drivers in fifth, with teammate and reigning world champion Lewis Hamilton languishing all the way down in 16th, some 2.3 seconds off the pace of the Williams cars. Rounding out the top ten were Felipe Massa's Ferrari, the Toyota of Timo Glock, Adrian Sutil's Force India (thus meaning that four of the six Mercedes–engined cars were in the top ten) and the first of the Renaults driven by Fernando Alonso.
  Rosberg was again the pace-setter in the second practice session, with a time some six-tenths of a second faster than what he achieved during the first 90-minute session. This time, Barrichello was second in his Brawn with the Toyota of Jarno Trulli in third. This marked an improvement for Trulli as he was only 12th in the first session. The only Australian in the field, Mark Webber ended up fourth for Red Bull Racing, ahead of Button, Glock and Nakajima. Webber's teammate Sebastian Vettel was eighth, after a morning session that was interrupted by a hydraulic failure which led him to pull his car off the road between turns six and seven. This ruled him out of the rest of the session, and restricted him to bottom of the timesheets and only four laps completed. Rounding out the top ten were Sutil's Force India, which ended up ninth again, and Massa in tenth. The three teams running the controversial rear diffusers (Brawn, Williams, and Toyota) were consistently the best teams on the track.
  Rosberg completed a clean sweep of top spots in practice, by coming fastest in Saturday's practice session. His time edged out Trulli's Toyota by just three thousandths of a second. Button was third, and the only other driver to break into the 1:25 lap times, just under two-tenths of a second behind Rosberg. Massa improved again to end up fourth, and be the only driver from McLaren or Ferrari to finish in the top ten. Nakajima again impressed in the Williams, finishing fifth, in front of Barrichello, Webber, and Glock, who took the next three fastest times and were split by around six hundredths of a second. The two BMW Sauber drivers—Robert Kubica and Nick Heidfeld—rounded out the top ten, as they appeared in the top ten on the timesheets for the first time, after a fraught pair of practice sessions on Friday.
  The qualifying session was split into three parts. The first part of qualifying runs for 20 minutes and eliminates the cars that finished the session 16th or lower. The second part of qualifying lasts for 15 minutes and eliminates cars that finished in positions 11 to 15. The final part of qualifying lasts for 10 minutes and determines the positions from first to tenth, and effectively decides who starts the Grand Prix in pole position. After dominating all three practice sessions on Friday, and again on Saturday morning, Rosberg did not fare so well in qualifying, managing a time only good enough for fifth position. The Brawn cars of Button and Barrichello dominated qualifying with the Brazilian finishing first in the first two parts of the session. In the third session, Button managed to beat his teammate's time by three-tenths of a second, and secured the fourth pole position of his career and his first pole since the 2006 Australian Grand Prix, that ended with Button's car blowing its engine on the final straight. Vettel's Red Bul
caption: Jenson Button's Brawn BGP 001, after a sponsorship deal was completed between the Brawn team and the Virgin Group founder Richard Branson
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