SAO PAULO (AFP) – Torrential rain brought havoc to qualifying for the Brazilian Grand Prix here on Saturday as Jenson Button saw his title hopes suffer a rain-soaked setback.
The Englishman, who came to the penultimate race of the year with a 14-point lead over Brawn GP teammate Rubens Barrichello, failed to reach the final qualifying session.
Barrichello, however, was into the Q3 top-10 shootout in front of his home crowd.
"The start of the session, we had way too much understeer and I couldn't do anything with it and then on lap three, the rear started going away," Button told the BBC after a second session which started 70 minutes late.
"We made a mistake not putting intermediate tyres on at the end. It's all of our decision, it's a team effort."
Sebastian Vettel, who had an outside chance of snatching the world title, was eliminated in the first qualifying session when his Red Bull slid all over the rain-soaked surface.
Vettel was only 16th fastest in a time of 1:25.009, over two seconds off the pace set by Nico Rosberg in his Williams, who clocked 1min 22.828sec.
"I feel like I went to the pool today, not the race track," said Vettel.
"It's disappointing. We would have liked to have qualified higher, but drivers have won from the back before."
Earlier, Giancarlo Fisichella spun off in his Ferrari and was left fuming at the conditions before the session was halted.
"It's impossible to drive. Crazy. It's dangerous everywhere, even in the pit lane. They need to do something. I aquaplaned and the anti-stall didn't work again," said the Italian.
World champion Lewis Hamilton was also a first session casualty as his McLaren, set up for dry running, was only 18th fastest.
"The conditions were awful, but our car was terrible," said Hamilton.
"It was a pretty poor performance from us. We couldn't even go flat-out on the straights. That's how bad it was. We didn't have a wet weather set-up, which probably contributed to it."
More heavy rain fell as the second session got underway, but that was quickly red-flagged when Force India's Tonio Liuzzi suffered a horror crash which destroyed his car.
"There was a lot of water. It was pretty dangerous. It was like a big puddle. Somehow I lost control in the middle of the straight," said Liuzzi.
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