Melbourne: Red Bull’s world champion Sebastian Vettel blew away his rivals in a dominant qualifying performance to claim pole position for the season-opening Australian Grand Prix on Saturday.

The 23-year-old German set the quickest time in all three sessions and managed a searing best lap of one minute 23.529 seconds, 0.778 seconds quicker than second-placed Briton Lewis Hamilton.

“Although the gap now might appear to be big, it’s a long season and a lot of things can happen,” said a cautious Vettel, who failed to finish the race here last year.

“It’s a good position to be in, and I'm very happy with that (but) we need to keep our feet on the ground.” Hamilton's late lap of 1.24.307 in his McLaren knocked Vettel’s teammate Mark Webber (1.24.395) off the front row of the grid, leaving the Australian to line up alongside Jenson Button in the second McLaren (1.24.779).

Ferrari’s twice former world champion Fernando Alonso claimed a spot on the third row in fifth place next to Renault’s Vitaly Petrov, the best ever qualifying position for the Russian.

Button, who will be gunning for a third successive win at Albert Park, conceded that Vettel had been untouchable.

“If you look at the pace of Sebastian, I mean they’re in a different league really in qualifying, whether it’s the same in the race I don’t know,” said Button.

“We don’t really know what our pace is really going to be like in the race distance yet.”

McLaren struggled for reliability in testing and Hamilton paid tribute to the “fantastic job” done by the team to give their two British drivers a competitive car.

“Absolutely thrilled to be here today, we’ve really got ourselves back on track,” the 2008 world champion said. German Michael Schumacher failed to fulfil the promise of good pre-season testing with Mercedes when he was unable to get through to the final session of qualifying by 0.089 seconds.

“After testing, coming to the first race we had expected certainly a different performance so naturally there is some disappointment,” the seven-time world champion. HRT’s Vitantonio Liuzzi and Narain Karthikeyan failed to get within 107 percent of the best time in the first qualifying session so will not be allowed to race.

The struggling Spanish-based team’s appeal to the stewards was dismissed later on Saturday, leaving just 22 cars on the grid for Sunday’s race.         (Reuters)