FE: Buemi takes pole, Piquet starts last

Sebastien Buemi secured pole position for the first round of the 2015/16 Formula E season, while defending champion Nelson Piquet Jr. will line up last for the Beijing ePrix.

Buemi defeated Renault e.dams teammate Nicolas Prost in the championship's first-ever 'superpole' session, despite a mistake on his flying lap.

Having topped Friday's test and the first Saturday practice Buemi emerged from the four mini-sessions comfortably quickest, with DS Virgin Racing's Jean-Eric Vergne splitting the two Renault Z.E.15s.

That put the trio through to the superpole, in which they were joined by Mahindra's Nick Heidfeld and practice two pacesetter Lucas di Grassi.

Di Grassi ran first but his 1m39.539s was not close to being a pole-lap contender, though Heidfeld pumped in a more respectable 1m38.339s.

Prost outpaced the Mahindra driver by 0.7s on his lap, but Vergne's effort lasted just a handful of seconds before he went down the escape road at Turn 1.

With the Frenchman consigned to fifth, Buemi was the only driver capable of toppling Prost, and he was two tenths up in the first sector.

A lock-up at the second chicane put him a tenth down on Prost after sector two, but the 2014/15 runner-up recovered with a perfect end to the lap to take pole by 0.28s with a 1m37.297s.

Behind the Renault e.dams drivers Heidfeld and di Grassi complete row two, ahead of Vergne and Stephane Sarrazin, who will line up sixth in his Venturi VM200-FE-01 after just missing out on the superpole by a tenth of a second.

The second Mahindra of Bruno Senna was seventh, while the encouraging practice form for the two Dragon Racing entries translated into eighth for Loic Duval and 10th for Jerome d'Ambrosio, with Sam Bird's Virgin DSV-01 in between.

Team China Racing driver Piquet, who will start 18th, was fighting the car throughout his qualifying segment. He was struggling after crashing in practice one and having limited running in practice two, and wound up a quarter of a second slower than next-worst qualifier, Team Aguri's debutant Nathanael Berthon. The sister NEXTEV TCR 001 of Oliver Turvey will start 15th for the team's home race.

SUPER POLE RESULTS:

REST OF STARTING ORDER:

Originally on Autosport.com