April 23, 2006	Sunday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 24, 1427

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)

IMOLA (Italy), April 22: Seven-time world champion Michael Schumacher returned to the fore by claiming a record-breaking 66th pole position here on Saturday for the San Marino Grand Prix.

Ferrari driver Schumacher, 37, set the standard in a time of one minute 23.431 seconds to break the record of three-time drivers' world champion Ayrton Senna that has stood since 1994.

A delighted Schumacher said: “With the car we had, getting a pole was sort of obvious, but it is always great to start from pole.

“The record is less important for me - you look at records when you finish racing. I think we can show our very strong race pace.”

German Schumacher, who has won six times at Imola and is still looking for his first victory of the season, beat the Honda pair of Briton Jenson Button, 26, and Brazilian Rubens Barrichello, 33, by less than two tenths of a second.

Button said: “We've done a lot of work overnight and really improved. We needed to because we were quite a long way off yesterday.”

Ferrari's pair came out early in the final 20-minute session to decide thetop-10 starting positions for Sunday's race and swapped the top spot between them before the rest of the major players took to the track.

But with the drivers scrambling for space on an empty track, nobody could touch Schumacher's time.

His Brazilian team-mate Massa, 24, will start ahead of Spain's world champion Fernando Alonso, whose Renault was next up.

Alonso's Renault team-mate Giancarlo Fisichella was a high-profile casualty of Formula One's knock-out qualifying system. Italian Fisichella, 32, missed the cut for the top-10 shoot-out by just 11 thousandths of a second.

And his chance of regaining a top-ten spot were ruined when BMW's German driver Nick Heidfeld, 28, crashed heavily exiting the Rivazza corner.

With yellow flags forcing drivers to slow down at the third gear right-hand turn, and only 52 seconds of the session remaining, Fisichella was knocked out.

His loss was McLaren driver Juan Pablo Montoya's gain. The Colombian, 30, switched to his spare chassis after his race car suffered an oil leak in practice.

Montoya avoided a 10-place penalty because his race engine was also transferred to the spare car, and he just made the cut in tenth place.

BMW's 1997 world champion Jacques Villeneuve, Williams Nico Rosberg – who was using his spare car after a practice crash - Red Bull's David Coulthard, Heidfeld, and Toro Rosso's Vitantonio Liuzzi were all eliminated at the end of session two.

There were no surprises in the first 15-minute session as Coulthard's Austrian team-mate Christian Klien missed the cut for the rest of qualifying by over four tenths of a second in 16th.

Behind him, the other five drivers eliminated were Toro Rosso's American driver Scott Speed, the Midlands of Tiago Monteiro, from Portugal, and Dutchman Christijan Albers - who spun at Rivazza, and Super Aguri's Japanese pair of Takuma Sato and Yuji Ide.

Starting grid:

First row: 1. Michael Schumacher (GER) 1:22.795, 2. Jenson Button (GBR) 1:22.988

Second row: 3. Rubens Barrichello (BRA) 1:23.242, 4. Felipe Massa (BRA)

1:23.702

Third row: 5. Fernando Alonso (ESP) 1:23.709, 6. Ralf Schumacher (GER) 1:23.772

Fourth row: 7. Juan Pablo Montoya (COL) 1:24.021, 8. Kimi Raikkonen (FIN) 1:24.158

Fifth row:

9. Jarno Trulli (ITA) 1:24.172, 10. Mark Webber (AUS)

1:24.795

Sixth row:

11. Giancarlo Fisichella (ITA) 1:23.771, 12. Jacques Villeneuve (CAN) 1:23.887

Seventh row: 13. Nico Rosberg (GER) 1:23.966, 14. David Coulthard (GBR) 1:24.101

Eight row:

15. Nick Heidfeld (GER) 1:24.129, 16. Vitantonio Liuzzi (ITA) 1:24.520

Ninth row:

17. Christian Klien (AUT) 1:25.410, 18. Scott Speed (USA) 1:25.437

10th row: 19. Tiago Monteiro (POR) 1:26.820, 20. Christijan Albers (NED) 1:27.088

11th row: 21. Takuma Sato (JPN) 1:27.609, 22. Yuji Ide (JPN) 1:29.282.--AFP