Lewis Hamilton lived up to his practice promise by dominating qualifying in Abu Dhabi to take an emphatic pole position for the season finale.
The McLaren ace was the man to beat throughout and duly paced all three seasons by comfortable margins – a massive two-thirds of a second in the decisive Q3.
Hamilton has been the form man in recent races as McLaren has mounted an impressive recovery from its disastrous start to the year with the problematic MP4-24, and now has a golden opportunity to head into the winter with a morale-boosting third win of the 2009 campaign.
Red Bull duo Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber surpassed expectations by taking second and third respectively, the German shading the Australian by 0.1s.
The hotly anticipated duel between Hamilton and his successor as world champion Jenson Button never materialised as Button struggled with a tyre vibration and had to settle for fifth place behind Brawn GP team-mate Rubens Barrichello.
Unusually, all the leading contenders opted for just one Q3 run, having learned from the previous sessions that it took several laps to get the best out of the tyres – this despite the fact that Formula 1’s first twilight qualifying session was taking place in temperatures nudging 30C.
Button laid down the first Q3 benchmark of 1m42.366s, while Hamilton blew his first lap when he ran wide at turn 17, and then Jarno Trulli (Toyota) and Barrichello briefly held the top spot.
Hamilton soon reasserted himself with a 1m41.773s to snatch provisional pole, before Webber went fastest and then Vettel upped the ante to 1m41.615s.
But just when it appeared that Hamilton’s rivals might run him closer than expected, the Briton uncorked a devastating 1m40.948s to seal his fourth pole of the season.
Qualifying has been Button’s Achilles heel in the second half of the season and so it proved again, the mysterious tyre vibration leaving him to grapple with braking instability and understeer on the BGP 001.
Trulli was shuffled back to sixth in the closing stages, while Robert Kubica and Nick Heidfeld gave BMW hope of a respectable send-off in its final grand prix by annexing the fourth row.
Nico Rosberg was a solid ninth for Williams ahead of Sebastien Buemi, who has been fast all weekend in the Toro Rosso and earned his second consecutive Q3 berth on his 21st birthday.
Kimi Raikkonen languished in 11th in the uncompetitive Ferrari, leaving the Italian team with precious little hope of winning its duel with arch-rival McLaren for third place in the constructors’ championship.
Toyota rookie Kamui Kobayashi was next up, while a transmission failure in Q2 left Heikki Kovalainen a deeply disappointing 13th on a day when it looked like he might join his McLaren team-mate Hamilton on the front row.
Williams’s Kazuki Nakajima squandered his chance of a Q3 appearance with a mistake at turn 14 on his final flier and will line up 14th ahead of Jaime Alguersuari in the second Toro Rosso.
Fernando Alonso’s hopes of ending his Renault career on a high were dealt a major blow when he failed to make it past the Q1 stage for the first time ever, consigning him to 16th on the grid.
Surprisingly neither Force India got through Q1, Tonio Liuzzi upstaging Adrian Sutil for the first time to take 17th.
And underlining the shake-up of the traditional pecking order that has been such a feature of this season, a Renault and a Ferrari will share the back row (Romain Grosjean and Giancarlo Fisichella).
Abu Dhabi Grand Prix grid
1. HAMILTON McLaren
2. VETTEL Red Bull
3. WEBBER Red Bull
4. BARRICHELLO Brawn
5. BUTTON Brawn
6. TRULLI Toyota
7. KUBICA BMW
8. HEIDFELD BMW
9. ROSBERG Williams
10. BUEMI Toro Rosso
11. RAIKKONEN Ferrari
12. KOBAYASHI Toyota
13. NAKAJIMA Williams
14. ALGUERSUARI Toro Rosso
15. ALONSO Renault
16. LIUZZI Force India
17. SUTIL Force India
18. KOVALAINEN McLaren*
19. GROSJEAN Renault
20. FISICHELLA Ferrari
* penalised five places for gearbox change