one being held on the Friday and the other being held on the Saturday. In the Friday session, Lotus who did some aerodynamic tweaks to the car similar to the Lola's new Indycar as they went to the top of the timesheets on Friday morning. But for Elio de Angelis he wouldn't be able to improve on his time with de Angelis responding after the second qualifying session, "I am sure I could have retained the pole." Senna would improve on his lap time but only slightly as he finished behind de Angelis on the grid in fourth. On the front row of the grid, Michele Alboreto would claim the first pole position of the season with a time of 1:27.768, a full one second ahead of his time on the Friday. Alboreto team-mate in Rene Arnoux also improve his time by a second. But had to start the race in seventh place with Arnoux needing to use the spare car after the Ferrari engine was down on power on his main car. Also on the front row of the grid was Keke Rosberg in the Williams-Honda who earlier in the weekend had a blown turbo from their engine on the Saturday morning. But one flying lap secured Rosberg a front row start with team mate Nigel Mansell starting from fifth. McLaren also has engine issues with the attempts of trying to do a qualifying boost not being able to run properly with the two drivers eventually starting in sixth (Alain Prost) and ninth (Niki Lauda) on the grid. Eighth on the grid was the first of the Pirelli's with Brabham driver, Nelson Piquet being the quickest. The designer of Brabham, Gordon Murray advised that their winter testing had been for the best race tyre and not for taking any pole positions in the first few races of the season. Rounding out the top ten was Renault driver, Derek Warwick who was 2.3 seconds off the pace. His team-mate, Patrick Tambay who started behind him in 11th advised that Renault was "four seconds behind the pace when we first tested the car here a month ago. Now it had been reduced to two seconds." Qualifying classification Race The race temperature for the race was a degree day as the driver's had line-up. Before the race, Prost finished fastest in the warm-up session ahead of Alboreto and Lauda rounding out the