next flying lap in frustration. Vergne was issued with a three-place grid penalty for the race after he made the cut for the second part in qualifying in seventeenth. Vergne said that he had to slow down because he was catching Timo Glock before his flying lap. Michael Schumacher left his flying laps until the dying moments of the session, and after making a mistake at the second Degner curve, he found himself in last place with one last lap to make it into Q2; he was slower than Senna in the first two sectors of the circuit before crossing the line with the sixteenth fastest time, pushing Senna out. The Lotus of Romain Grosjean set the session's fastest time on the softer compound tyres, followed by the two Saubers and his teammate Kimi Räikkönen, who also needed to use those tyres. Behind Senna was the Caterham of Heikki Kovalainen in nineteenth, albeit with a time more than a second slower than Senna. His teammate, Vitaly Petrov, had a disappointing session qualifying in twenty-third place, as the two Marussia cars sandwiched an impressive HRT of Pedro de la Rosa, with Timo Glock taking twentieth and Charles Pic taking twenty-second. Petrov was, however, only two tenths slower than Glock, but three tenths faster than Narain Karthikeyan who took last place on the grid. As Vergne qualified in seventeenth place in Q2, and Michael Schumacher came to the race with a ten-place grid drop penalty for causing an avoidable incident in Singapore after eventually qualifying 13th – Senna, Kovalainen and Glock started two places further up on the grid in 16th, 17th and 18th respectively, and behind Vergne, de la Rosa, Pic and Petrov moved up one place on the grid to start from 20th, 21st and 22nd respectively in front of Schumacher and Karthikeyan. Every car used the option tyres during the second part of qualifying. Di Resta complained over his pit-to-car radio after he had to weave in and out of Webber and Grosjean on a flying lap approaching the final chicane. This was not his fastest time, however, as he missed out on reaching the final part of qualifying by just half a tenth of a second, in twelfth place. The Toro Rossos failed to progress in the session in sixteenth and seventeenth, with Daniel Ricciardo out-qualifying Vergne for the eleventh time in 2012, and the Mercedes duo of