Ah, it's all about McLaren, isn't it? Um, not here at Sidepodcast Towers, it's not. Mr C is keeping an eye on the ongoing saga, making sure we don't miss anything important - but how could you? Everyone's talking about it.

Personally, whilst I care what happens to McLaren and I'm interested in how the FIA is screwing this whole problem up to be ten times worse, I want to talk about other things.

How about qualifying today? On the surface, it was pretty dull, but there were some nuggets of info to take note of. Firstly, Jenson Button scraping through to the last session of qualifying. Until now, he hasn't managed to get through to Q3 at all this season. In Monaco he was promoted to 10th place after Coulthard's demotion, but on legitimate speed, the Honda has been lacking. Barrichello was bemoaning the wind tunnel a while ago, but this course requires very little aero efficiency so their problems are less of a hindrance... for this race, at least.

As always, after the event, Button was pretty calm about the whole thing, although for once he kept a reign on his negative streak to say:

The car is also looking after the tyres well which shows that it is mechanically sound. If I can get a good start from 10th tomorrow then we have to be aiming for the points.

- Jenson Button

Talking of tyres, Honda were clearly not expecting Button to get any further than Q2, because they used up all the soft tyres by the end of that session. Heading into the third, it was going to be near impossible for JB to get much higher using hard tyres whilst everyone else was enjoying the luxury of the softs. To be honest, I didn't notice him at all during the third session, and for all I knew, he could have been sitting the session out in the garage. But still, it's nice to know that he was there.

In other non-McLaren news, Anthony Davidson again managed to out-class Sato by getting through to Q2. He also repeated the experience of the previous race weekend by making us all think he was going to scrape into the top 10, and then being pushed out by Trulli. Battling that closely with the one lap specialist can't hurt one's ego too much, though, can it?

The last thing I'll comment on is Nick Heidfeld managing to jump Räikkönen to fourth place. We have seen the BMWs hovering around and picking up points whenever any of the top four guys have a misfortune but it's interesting to see him get the better of a Ferrari with no mechanical holdups. Perhaps Räikkönen was still a bit rattled from the crash earlier in Free Practice 2. Did you see the onboard? The tyre wall approached seriously (scarily) fast.

No time to talk about Ralf being useless again, and Vettel's highest Toro Rosso qualifying spot so far. Here's hoping the race has more of the same nuggety goodness to watch out for.